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THE MAKING OF CANADA 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

THE FIGHT WITH FRANCE FOR 

NORTH AMERICA 

New and Revised Edition, with Frontispiece and Maps 

Demy8vo. 5s.net 

' The story has all the stir and tension of a romance. ' 

Morning Post. 

1 The story of the Seven Years' War in America is 
one of the most stirring and romantic in history.' 

Westminster Gazette. 



CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 

Popular Edition, with Illustrations 

Demy 8vo. 5s. net 

Sir Gilbert Parker :— ' If I could, I would put 
this volume in the hands of every public man in the 
Empire, of every merchant, of every intending settler.' 



TH E MAKING 

i 

OF CANADA 



BY 

A. G. BRADLEY 

M 

AUTHOR OF 'THE FIGHT WITH FRANCE FOR NORTH AMERICA 
' CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY,' ETC. ETC. 



NEW YORK 
E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY 

1908 



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PREFACE 

This book is virtually a sequel to The Fight with France 
for North America^ now republished, in which I described 
the long Anglo-French conflict that terminated in the 
conquest of Canada. The title I venture to think is entirely 
justified, in spite of the fact that the various provinces were 
not consolidated into what is now known as the Dominion 
of Canada till a much later day. In the half-century fol- 
lowing the conquest, of which the present book treats, 
occurred all those events which formed and stereotyped the 
British provinces as did every crisis which seriously threat- 
ened their existence and their future. After the American 
war of 1 812-15 they were left free to pursue their respective 
destinies along the lines upon which the stormy period of 
trial, friction and bloodshed here dealt with had moulded 
them. During these first fifty years the Old French 
Canada was familiarised with British rule, the attempt of 
the revolting American Colonies to include it in their con- 
federacy was frustrated, the loyalist refugees from that 
struggle arrived to create those British provinces which as 
populous and well-organised communities ultimately united 
with the other to form the present Dominion. Lastly, the 
close of this half-century witnessed that struggle for exist- 
ence under the British flag, waged by both races side by 
side with British troops, which determined once and for all 
the question of allegiance and confined their future troubles 
and trials to matters of domestic if sometimes serious 
import. It would be idle to suppose that any relation of 



vi THE MAKING OF CANADA 

these last would at present appeal to very many readers 
outside the Dominion. But the earlier period has far more 
claims to general notice, and is in truth a far more stirring 
one, not only from its really dramatic episodes in both 
peace and war, but from the fact that through the whole 
of it Canada was more or less involved in the great struggle 
of nations which agitated the world from the Seven Years' 
War till the fall of Napoleon. 

There are several excellent short histories of Canada ; 
compassing its three centuries in a single volume, achieve- 
ments of compression that admit of room for little more than 
bare facts ; history condensed for elementary purposes, not 
for the type of reader whose interest I have before solicited 
upon this subject, and now again venture to solicit. There 
are also many-volumed works valuable to the student and 
specialist, but altogether out of scale for the purpose in 
hand even if readily accessible to the general reader, which 
they are not. 

I have here attempted to depict the most vital and most 
interesting period of Canadian history within a compass 
that is neither sketchy on the one hand, nor monumental on 
the other. The original material for this period, in the State 
Papers, the British Museum, and elsewhere, is abundant. 
I had already collected a great deal of that used here for 
my Life of Dorchester^ recently written for the publisher 
and editors of The Makers of Canada series. In the final 
chapters dealing with the war of 1 8 12-15 I was confronted 
with the difficulties of compression, and unlike the rest of 
the period was on ground that has been admirably and 
recently covered in handy volumes by Dr. Hannay and Mr. 
Lucas as well as in older and practically obsolete works. 

A. G. B. 

Rye, Sussex. 



CONTENTS 



/ 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. INTRODUCTORY ...... I 



II. CANADA UNDER MURRAY . . . . 1 8 

III. CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT: 1 766- 1 774 . . 36 

IV. THE INVASION OF CANADA . . . . .65 
V. THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC ..... 89 

VI. THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR . . .112 

VII. THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS .... 140 

VIII. UPPER AND LOWER CANADA . , . . 178 

IX. DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE . . . . . 214 

X. IMMIGRATION— SETTLEMENT AND PROGRESS . . 242 

,<XI. THE APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES . 27 1 

XII. THE WAR IN l8l2 ...... 296 

vii 



viii THE MAKING OF CANADA 

CHAPTER PAOE 

XIII. THE WAR IN 1 813 . . . . . . 326 

XIV. THE WAR IN 1814 . . . . . 353 
XV. CONCLUSION ....... 378 

INDEX ........ 392 



CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTORY 

In a former volume, which told of the conquest of Canada, 
my story closed with the surrender of the shrunken band of 
its brave French defenders upon the old Place d'Armes at 
Montreal. The success of Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham 
was not the end of French dominion, though it made 
that end inevitable. A majority of my readers will doubt- 
less need reminding that for many months following the 
famous victory a British garrison, penned within the ram- 
parts of Quebec, represented our only footing in Canada, 
and had to face sickness, scanty fare, a rigorous winter, and 
a vigilant foe smarting with defeat, and led by an able 
general. Nor is it often remembered that a sortie in force 
from the isolated city, in the March following the death 
of Wolfe, resulted in a severe repulse near the Plains of 
Abraham, known as the battle of St. Foy. Murray, the 
British commander, it is sometimes said, though probably 
without reason, was stimulated to this action by a desire to 
emulate the fame of his late chief. But he only gave Levis, 
then in much superior strength, an opportunity to avenge 
the death of Montcalm by a thousand British casualties, 
and to relieve the gloom of the fall of Canada with the 
illuminating memory of a single glorious day. 

I have told too, in this former story, how a British fleet 
relieved the hard-won and now hard-pressed city, and how 
three British armies, from east, west, and south, reached 
Montreal upon the same September day of the same year, 
1760, and left the civil and military government of Canada 

A 



2 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

enclosed therein no alternative but the immediate surrender 
of the colony and the troops that had fought so bravely for 
so many years in its defence. 

It was a gay and bright little city of some 7000 souls 
that witnessed this transfer of no insignificant slice of the 
earth's surface from France to Britain, and the fall of the 
curtain on French dominion and French ambition in North 
America. A town too of martial and adventurous traditions, 
but for all that, the home of many polished folk whose 
sprightly manner and brave attire, and well-ordered villas 
set upon the surrounding slopes drew notes of admiration 
from such of their conquerors as kept diaries, or wrote 
letters that have come down to us ; a place whose destiny at 
the head of a vast waterway, and at the edge of an illimitable 
wilderness, was patent to the earliest settlers, and had grown 
slowly but surely amid Indian wars and Indian trade. 
Steeped in the heroic deeds of priest and soldier, as in the 
merciless traditions of the white man's petite guerre, its 
bells, during the past five critical years, had rung out many 
a victorious peal, in an altogether greater and more vital 
struggle, and now the end had come ! A century and a half 
has passed away since the remnant of those half-dozen 
French regiments who fought through the war stacked 
their arms on the Place d'Armes at Montreal, and the last 
French drum beat on Canadian soil. As one stands to-day 
on the uplifted sylvan ridge from which Montreal was 
named, a noble city of 300,000 souls spreads itself beneath 
one's feet, from the base of the same mountain to the banks 
of the St. Lawrence, whose broad belt of blue shimmers wide 
across the middle distance. Next to the prospect of Quebec 
from the deck of an approaching vessel, and the far-ex- 
panding outlook from the historic heights above it, that 
which rewards the visitor who with pious zeal ascends the 
mountain at Montreal assuredly takes rank. More par- 
ticularly must this be so if he have in his mind the story of 
Canada as he looks away into the glimmering distance to 
the southward, whence the tide of the old wars rolled back 



INTRODUCTORY 3 

and forth, or up and down the broad trail of the river which, 
from east or west, bore those varied flotillas, pregnant with 
weal or woe, to the great trading station. 

Down in the business heart of the city, and but a short 
way from the ample docks which now obscure the old 
landing - places of sloop, batteau, and canoe, the Place 
d'Armes is still there for those who, amid the triumphs of 
modern progress, can yet spare a thought for the days of 
old. Hard by, too, the Notre - Dame church and the 
picturesque Chateau de Ramezy, which sheltered the French, 
and afterwards the earlier English governors, almost alone 
remain to recall the old regime and the dramatic scene 
with which it closed. No conditions were then exacted* 
as is sometimes rather loosely stated. With nearly 18,000 
veteran troops in and around the city, Amherst had De 
Levis and his 2000 men at his mercy ; but generous con- 
ditions, as every one knows, were granted. Those relating 
to purely military matters, such as the shipment of the 
French troops and kindred details, do not concern us here, 
but ample protection was guaranteed to the religion and 
the religious corporations of the Canadians, and full 
opportunity to those who wished to leave the country of 
disposing of their property. But it was not till the Treaty 
of Paris in 1763, more than two years later, after the actual 
close of the war, that these privileges, and many others, 
were formally confirmed to the ' new subjects.' It was 
from this latter date, too, that I would start my narrative. 
For though France and England sheathed their swords on 
the continent of North America at the surrender of Canada, 
the Seven Years' War dragged on its weary length elsewhere 
till the close of 1762. Nor need the interregnum in Canada 
detain us. Military rule, exercised for the most part with 
discretion and generosity, prevailed under Murray at Quebec, 
with Haldimand and Burton commanding at Montreal 
and Three Rivers respectively. The war-wearied Canadians 
of all ranks welcomed peace only too gladly, and returned 
to its pursuits under the protection of their own civil laws 



4 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

and customs, and a criminal code more merciful than their 
own, administered by British officers in a manner both 
lenient and just. It must be always remembered that the 
retention of Canada was by no means yet an accepted fact. 
Pending the Treaty of Paris, signed in February 1763, this 
question became quite a burning one in Great Britain, and 
was eagerly discussed by pamphleteers and politicians both 
within and without the Houses of Parliament. This may 
now seem at first sight almost incredible, but a few words will, 
I trust, show what a plausible case was put forward by the 
opponents of retention, even had a quid pro quo> reckoned 
at that time an extremely valuable one, been left out of 
consideration. The contention rested, in short, on an 
eventuality still hidden in the mists of the future, and 
inviting the widest differences of opinion. We know now 
who were right ; but we also know how much less of a 
catastrophe to Britain that which they foresaw has proved. 
I need hardly say that this was the effect which the with- 
drawal of France would produce on the British American 
colonies. There would seem nowadays to be a tolerably 
prevalent, if rather vague, impression that these populous 
provinces were ardently attached to the British connection 
and the British Crown. So far as this was true it was due 
mainly to the fact that without it their existence would not 
have been worth a year's purchase, and they knew it. 
Nevertheless the colonists suffered, and that very con- 
sciously, grave inconvenience from the restrictions on their 
sea-borne trade, only modified by wholesale smuggling, and 
the attempts to combat this provoked no small share of 
the discontent, which ripened into revolt. These people, it 
should be remembered, were not generally English folk of 
the old-country type who happened to live in America. 
They were mostly the descendants of men who had gone 
out in the seventeenth century, and developed another type 
of Briton in an atmosphere which, climatically and socially, 
differed widely from that of the mother-country. That 
these colonies, or rather groups of colonies, differed from 



INTRODUCTORY 5 

one another matters nothing, but only emphasises the 
extreme spirit of provincialism and independence which 
animated them all. Even in appearance and manner of 
speech they had already as a mass drifted away from the 
conventional Englishman. How indeed could it have been 
otherwise ? All contemporary evidence of a more intimate 
as well as an official nature goes to prove that the average 
European and the average Anglo-American, then as now, 
misunderstood one another, to put it mildly, in the early 
stages at any rate, of individual acquaintanceship. Every 
colony was practically a republic, with the further entertain- 
ment of a perennial quarrel with its royal or proprietary 
governor, whose salary it refused to vote if that usually 
unfortunate official proved intractable. They were above 
all things democratic, though the note might vary some- 
what in nature and degree in different sections. Modern 
American fiction, with retrospective yearnings after a more 
decorative past, revels in the creation of gorgeous whites 
who, in the planting colonies, led the lives of luxurious 
nabobs among a deferential tenantry and a vast retinue of 
negro slaves. Sober fact, however, pursuing the same 
retrospective course, runs up against a simple, plain-living 
country gentleman farming his own somewhat ill-cultivated 
acres, with a dozen or two African slaves, and perhaps a 
few indentured European whites. He too, with rare ex- 
ceptions, is a democrat, though drawing the line of recogni- 
tion perhaps at freeholders, with no particular devotion to 
the King, and certainly no special liking for the very few 
Englishmen he had seen, with what appear to him their 
insufferable airs. His interest was quite absorbed in his 
own affairs, or at the most in those of his own province. 
He rarely knew anything of neighbouring provinces, for 
there were no sources of information, nor did he often 
desire this knowledge, regarding them with feelings any- 
thing but friendly. When the French peril arose before 
the Seven Years' War, and threatened to wall him out from 
his fertile western country with a belt of military occupa- 



6 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

tion, and a possible prospect of some day tumbling him 
into the Atlantic, it scarcely disturbed the even tenor of 
his life. He only half believed the warnings of the outer 
world enunciated by governors and other tiresome people, 
for he had rarely even seen a Frenchman unless the sons 
and grandsons of a few Anglicised Huguenot refugees may 
count for such. When another kind of Frenchmen, however, 
began to build forts on the wild lands of companies in 
which he had shares, he began to bestir himself a little. 
The middle and southern colonies, with a population of 
over half a million, raised a few paid companies of tattered 
white men, stiffened by Scotch-Irish frontiermen, for which 
they could scarcely find officers among their abundant 
well-to-do class. When Braddock with his regulars came 
out to help them every difficulty was thrown in that poor 
choleric gentleman's way. When his defeat let loose a 
horde of French-incited savages on the frontiers, and 
deluged them with blood, the people of the lower countries, 
not being personally inconvenienced, pursued the paths of 
peace and agriculture with sublime indifference, though 
ten thousand well-to-do horsemen, used to firearms, could 
have been mustered without putting any appreciable strain 
on either individual or colonial resources. The English 
have been called a warlike but unmilitary race, which, 
despite the touch of paradox, is a not infelicitous description. 
But when blows are going anywhere England has always 
been prolific in adventurous souls who want to give and 
take them. The hatred to militarism displayed by Pennsyl- 
vania, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas at a moment 
when their own people were being butchered, and their future 
threatened by a power of alien blood, language, and religion, 
has no parallel in British anti-militarism. Selfish apathy is 
perhaps the truer phrase. Nor did the love even of glory 
or adventure fire the souls of one per cent, of that genera- 
tion of the well-endowed youth of the southern colonies 
throughout the war, for scarcely three thousand rank and 
file were raised between them all during that critical period, 



INTRODUCTORY 7 

and nothing like enough young men of the right class came 
forward to officer this meagre force. If, however, in speak- 
ing of colonial democracy and republicanism, I have misled 
the reader into thinking that the American colonists dis- 
regarded the distinctions of birth, means, and education, I 
must hasten to correct so false an impression. They were 
practical common-sense people, without any unworkable 
theories, and their social arrangements being natural and 
unaggressive, in no way interfered with an outdoor re- 
publicanism. The gentry class of the old colonies were, as 
a matter of fact, perhaps the most robust opponents of 
monarchical interference, and their pride the most easily 
touched, not merely by any political encroachments, but 
by those little sparks that the blundering unconscious 
Englishman of all time is apt to strike when he comes in 
contact with more sensitive bodies not moulded upon his 
particular pattern. This civic temper then, and this torpor 
in martial affairs, the British statesman had to take into 
consideration, when discussing a question of really pro- 
digious import. Pennsylvania had great excuse for its 
military shortcomings, being largely dominated by Quakers 
whose faith forbade recourse to arms, while Germans, little 
interested in anything beyond their personal affairs, were 
another strong element. The Jerseys and New York had 
shown reasonable activity in the late struggle, while the 
New England colonies, always martial compared to the 
rest, had covered themselves with glory by the exertions 
that they had made in men, money, and performance. 
Now throughout the middle and southern colonies there 
was some ground for assuming a certain amount of senti- 
mental attachment to the British connection. But no man 
with the least knowledge of New England, well as her 
provinces had fought, would have suspected her people 
generally of altruistic attachments of this kind. The 
triumphs of Chatham's war kindled for the moment an 
outburst of rejoicing that might well have deceived not 
merely distant Britons, but almost the bell-ringers them- 



8 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

selves. The French terror had been removed, a deliverance 
of infinite significance to the northern colonies, while 
even those of the south had learned something about the 
French before the end of the struggle, and in part realised 
what fate might have been theirs. But the war, while it 
produced a quite unprecedented intercourse between the 
people of the various provinces who, in field and camp, 
could readily fraternise, had a precisely opposite effect on 
the relations of the provincials with their British deliverers. 
There had been continual friction between them in matters 
of business, and no little in social intercourse. In short, a 
near acquaintance had produced no small measure of that 
mutual antipathy with which the abounding correspondence 
of the period bristles. It is an old story this, and in a 
slightly altered and modified form still pursues its inevitable 
way in Anglo-Colonial relationships. In 1762, however, 
there were in England, for obvious reasons, great numbers 
of persons, soldiers mainly, who had spent many years 
in America. On the question at issue it is significant that 
those who favoured the retention of Canada, and discounted 
the fear of colonial secession, did so, not on the grounds 
of any British attachments, but on the impossibility of any 
effective union against the power of Britain. Franklin 
himself scouted the notion of secession, but purely on those 
grounds. The abandonment of Canada in a military sense 
must have been at that moment, too, a bitter suggestion, 
and one is not surprised at the great preponderance of those 
who could not or would not look the possible result of the 
alternative in the face. Moreover, the Canada just wrested 
from the French included illimitable territory to the north- 
west, and the regions beyond the Ohio at the back of the 
colonies. A third suggestion was to restore only that 
portion of the country then occupied and roughly indicated 
by the present province of Quebec. But this did not come 
seriously on the table. If the French were permitted to 
retain any footing on the mainland, it was said that another 
war, sooner or later, was inevitable. We are at this day 



INTRODUCTORY 9 

only too familiar with that foolish article in the treaty 
which, in the teeth of Pitt's protests, left two rocky islands 
and some awkwardly defined fishing rights on the New- 
foundland coast to France as a constant source of friction 
between the countries even to our own time. 

Precisely the same considerations, curiously enough, were 
agitating the minds of Frenchmen. Many were opposed to 
receiving Canada back again, regarding it as a barren, 
inhospitable country that brought them no profit and much 
trouble, and they, too, found further consolation in the 
prediction that its gain would bring about the loss of 
her American colonies to Great Britain. Some, on the other 
hand, protested that without Canada, its timber and its coast 
fisheries, the French marine would sink into insignificance. 

With the British Government the matter finally resolved 
itself into the alternatives of Guadeloupe or Canada. Turn- 
ing to the map to-day and looking at that little French 
island in the Caribbean Sea, sixty by twenty miles perhaps 
in area, one may well feel amazement. But Guadeloupe 
had that year sent home over half a million pounds-worth 
of sugar and cotton, while Canada had exported a few 
thousand pounds-worth only of furs. The scale of the figures 
may seem to us nowadays to give this particular argument 
trifling significance. At that time, however, there was an 
important element who held tropical colonies as the most 
to be desired. Their produce competed with no home 
market, and supplied England with what she otherwise 
would have had to buy from foreign countries, nor did they 
set up manufactures. Jamaica, for instance, not merely 
performed the first office, but purchased nearly twice as 
much from Great Britain as the whole of New England 
combined, though the continental colonies were gaining 
rapidly on the islands. Burke, among others, was against 
retention not merely from his preference for tropical and 
above all for island colonies, but from fear of loosening the 
only practical tie that bound the American provinces to 
Britain. 



io THE MAKING OF CANADA 

The treaty was signed, however, in February, and France 
retained nothing in North America but New Orleans and the 
two islands off Newfoundland. Nor will it be amiss to con- 
sider for a moment what this Canada surrendered to Great 
Britain precisely meant and what were its bounds. Nova 
Scotia had been British for just half a century, containing 
only the remnant of the Acadians and the settlers from New 
and Old England and from Germany who took part in or 
followed the founding of Halifax in 1748, after which a 
government and small legislature had in due course been 
established. Cape Breton, with its dismantled town and 
fortress of Louisbourg, was given up by the French and 
united with Nova Scotia, to which Prince Edward Island, 
till then unsettled, was also temporarily attached. New- 
foundland retained its isolation under its own government. 
As regards Canada proper, with which we are mainly here 
concerned, it represented in the first place all that we usually 
now mean by the term so far as Lake Superior, beyond 
which nothing was sufficiently accessible to have raised any 
serious question of claim or ownership. But what really 
gave such peculiar significance to the newly acquired terri- 
tory, and created such complications in regard to its future 
government, was the vast region between the Ohio and the 
Mississippi that automatically passed with it under the 
French cession. Into this country from the eastward ran 
the parallel lines of Pennsylvania and Virginia, with western 
boundaries as yet undetermined. At the moment when 
swarms of greedy speculators, now relieved from fear of the 
French, were grasping at wild lands beyond the Alleghanies, 
richer than any in their respective states, feudal tenure and 
the Catholic faith had, technically at least, been set up there 
by Act of Parliament. For an Anglo-American pioneer to 
find his imperial westward progress barred by such an 
unspeakable combination, and that too erected by a free 
and Protestant Government, seemed an outrage of the most 
flagrant kind. So in due course the new province of Quebec 
was delimited upon lines roughly corresponding with the 



INTRODUCTORY n 

Quebec and Ontario of modern times. The great region 
beyond Lakes Huron and Erie, occupied by Indian tribes 
and sparse villages of French traders and a thin sprinkling 
of forts, was now to be garrisoned by small companies of 
British regulars. A turbulent wilderness was this, almost 
immediately to become the scene of a great Indian war, and 
administered by the British Commander-in-Chief at New 
York till it fell into the melting-pot of the American revo- 
lution twenty years later, and passed from British rule to 
become ultimately the States of Michigan, Ohio, and 
Wisconsin. 

This brief survey of Western solitudes brings us at last 
to the region that actually represented the Canada of that 
day. An attenuated belt of humanity, its habitations began 
upon either bank of the St. Lawrence about eighty miles 
below Quebec, and from the latter again hugged the river 
for the whole 170 miles of its upward course to Montreal, 
where it abruptly terminated. This was a considerable 
distance for some 70,000 souls, a fifth part of whom were 
domiciled in three towns, to cover with their little home- 
steads, keeping them at the same time virtually within easy 
sight and touch of one another. West of the island of 
Montreal wooded solitudes stretched away, fringing the 
northern shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie, till they dipped 
into the great inland sea of Huron which cut immediately 
across their path. This virgin tract within the lakes was to 
become the province of Upper Canada twenty years later 
when the English loyalists came. In the French time it 
was all trackless forest, with a fort only at Niagara and an 
old French settlement at Detroit, its extreme limit. The 
Canada that Wolfe and Amherst conquered had grown up 
on a system absolutely unique in the history of modern 
colonisation. The inhabitants were mostly the product of 
the experiments and theories of Louis XIV. in his youthful 
and comparatively virtuous days. Some of them, to be 
sure, were the descendants of a small company who pre- 
ceded the emigration fervour of the Grand Monarque. But 



12 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

all were carrying out his original ideas and piously adhering 
to the picturesque schemes under which he and Colbert and 
Turgot had planted them a century before. These were in 
effect quasi-feudal and wholly ecclesiastical. The original 
pioneers of Champlain, the traders, servants, priests, and 
high-born devotees who founded Quebec and Montreal, had 
certainly done nothing to taint the atmosphere with political 
or religious heresies, or sterilise the soil for the reception 
of these offshoots of an old-world system. The four thousand 
or so transplanted peasants and others, the ancestors of the 
men who fought under Montcalm, did not find that such 
initiative was required of them when they had been set 
down on the banks of the St. Lawrence. They were neither 
to be freeholders, scholars, village lawyers, politicians, nor 
heretics. They were to be virtuous, industrious, ignorant, 
and happy, obedient to their governors and priests, and to 
the seigniors who had been granted the large tracts of wild 
woodland, out of which their tenants cleared long strips 
back from the river and set their gabled one-storied white- 
washed houses upon the river bank in neighbourly pro- 
pinquity. This Canadian aristocracy had been manufactured, 
partly from the host of penniless petite noblesse of seventeenth- 
century France, some of whom, as officers or adventurers, 
found their way across the Atlantic, and partly from such 
persons of humble origin as could and would pay the very 
moderate sum required for a seigniory with the honours 
and obligations thereby involved. So though all nobles 
were seigniors, the seigniors were by no means all noble. 
The scheme had achieved permanency and prospered in that 
it fulfilled most of its somewhat restricted purposes. The 
seigniors had been gradually increased as population grew 
and prominent families had been ennobled by patent from 
time to time. A list of the adult male nobles resident in 
Canada in 1761 lies before me and contains about three 
hundred names. This would mean probably one hundred 
heads of families, particularly as another seventy or eighty 
Canadian gentilhommes were serving in Europe as French 



INTRODUCTORY 13 

officers. It was compulsory on the seigniors to open up 
their estates, held in trust as it were for the Crown, which 
frequently exercised its right of resumption when the con- 
ditions of ownership were neglected. The seigniory had 
usually a frontage of three or four leagues, with a much 
greater depth in the forest behind. It was on such estates 
the peasantry were settled, the average holding having had 
a frontage of two or three hundred yards, and a depth of a 
mile or more. The tenant or censitaire, so long as he paid 
the almost nominal rent to his lord in cash or capons, 
ground his corn at the seigniorial mill, and observed other 
feudal dues if they were required, was secure in his holding. 
He could sell his interest subject to the fine of a twelfth 
part of the purchase-money to his seignior, while the latter 
could sell his seigniory with the larger tribute of a fifth to 
the Crown. The revenue from such properties was inevit- 
ably small, sometimes nothing but what the^ seignior could 
extract from his 'home farm' by his own labour. This 
curious aristocracy exhibited every variety of condition 
except that of wealth, of which there was none. Some few 
had improved their estates to a moderate degree or held 
offices under the Crown. Some were well educated and 
ruffled it at the Governor's little court in brave attire; 
others could not write their names, and led the lives of 
peasants. The fur trade, though strictly tied by Crown, 
company, and official privileges, tempted the impecunious 
seignior or his sons to defy such restrictions and turn trader 
on his own account. The wild adventurous life of the 
forest, too, had a fascination of its own for men whose 
temperament was in fact well suited for excelling in it. 
The situation in which the average Canadian seignior found 
himself was not an attractive one for a man of action or 
ambition. He had no voice whatever in the government 
of the colony, which was controlled by a governor, intendant, 
and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, always held in 
their turn with a tight rein by the King and his Council at 
home. Save for some petty magisterial work the seignior 



14 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

was politically a cipher in his own country, the very price 
of his crops with those of his tenants often fixed in arbitrary 
fashion by corrupt officials from France for their own benefit. 
From such a company, however, came ideal leaders in 
frontier war, and explorers who have never been surpassed. 
The habitants, who from the first scorned the name of 
peasant, considering themselves, and actually being, in an 
altogether better position than their contemporaries in old 
France, had nevertheless to serve in the militia and march to 
war when called upon without pay ; and were, furthermore, 
liable to the Government corvee. The militia was officered 
by district captains of the seigniorial class, though not of 
necessity themselves seigniors. Parishes had been organised 
early, and churches of generous proportions had by degrees 
lifted their tin or shingle spires above the thatched roofs of 
the settlements. The Church and its religious orders owned 
immense tracts of land in the colony. The hierarchy, as 
I have said, suffered no interference in their department 
from the civil or military government, while free enough 
with theirs in matters properly outside their sphere. The 
parish priest shared an autocratic but not unkindly sway 
over his habitants in most affairs of life with the seignior 
or the militia captain, and in his own department was 
supreme. His dime or tithe, literally a twenty-seventh, was 
punctually paid, not as a civil ordinance, but by the decree 
of the Church which carried an equal obligation. The dis- 
cipline of his Church, whose moral tone was high, and which 
vigilantly strove against demoralising influences, pressed 
somewhat on the more restive souls who sought refuge in 
the woods, and in the ranks of the coureurs de bois employed 
by the fur trade, from the kindly but censorious eye of 
the priest. Sprung mainly from Normandy and its fringes, 
and in a less degree from the country around Rochelle, the 
habitants were a hardy and hard-headed people. Their 
limitations, ignorance, and credulity, which caused such 
trouble to their new but well-meaning rulers, was the fault 
of the paternal system which for good or evil deliberately 



INTRODUCTORY 15 

sought to keep them ignorant. A God-fearing people, 
content with their station, with their farm, and with the 
rule of those above them, was the ideal colony of the 
seventeenth-century Frenchmen who created this one, and 
of their successors who strove to maintain those ideals. 
In the latter half of the same century the accepted theory 
of a perfect government, throughout Latin Europe at any 
rate, was a silent, submissive, voiceless people, ruled by a 
benignant despotism, and the theory of Europe was success- 
fully applied to Canada. There were plenty of Frenchmen 
who saw the material failure thus produced, and noted with 
envy the comparative opulence of their English neighbours 
to the southward. Still these last were heretics and factious 
politicians whose governors were sincerely to be pitied ; 
money grubbers, unadventurous, plodding husbandmen and 
mighty poor soldiers till the Seven Years' War, in the eyes 
of Canadians, who, usually governed by able warriors as a 
quasi-military colony, were strongly imbued with the 
military spirit. 

This is no place for defining the precise limitation of 
French Canadian settlement at the conquest. I have de- 
scribed it with quite sufficient accuracy for the purpose as 
lining both banks of the St. Lawrence. But I shall some- 
what relieve my conscience in this respect by remarking 
that the considerable island of Orleans just beneath Quebec 
was perhaps of all the best cultivated ; and furthermore, 
that up the fertile level lands along the Richelieu and south 
of Montreal a portion of the regiment of Carrignan, with 
many of its officers, had been settled in the seventeenth cen- 
tury. Here and there, too, more opulent Seigniors, when 
exposed to the Indian or New England frontier, had en- 
trenched themselves in embattled stone fortresses, like the 
now ruinous Boisbrule on the Lake of the two mountains, 
or the long disappeared castle, flanked with corner towers, 
which we read of as inhabited by the Baron de Longueil, 
representative of the only Canadian barony, across the 
river from Montreal. The great disturbers of the domestic 



16 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

peace both of the town and adjoining parishes, and the 
bane of the authorities civil and clerical, were the coureurs 
de bois. On their return from the far west with their pay- 
in their pockets and their veins dancing with the fumes of 
rum or brandy, they were reckless, roistering bravos, with 
a contempt for all following a steady calling, and affecting 
themselves the swagger and airs of gentilhommes, which a 
few of them actually were. The trade of Canada had been 
trifling, beaver skins its chief unit of commerce, as tobacco 
on a much greater scale was that of Virginia, and the beaver 
trade was easily overdone, while a little timber and wheat 
almost completes the list of exports. The balance of its 
small trade was nearly always against it, and the Home 
Government had been regularly compelled to come to its 
relief. The habitants, however, with occasional periods of 
dearth, lived upon the whole a self-supporting life of rude 
plenty, well clad, well warmed, well housed. Early marriage 
was carried almost to excess, and grandmothers of thirty 
were not uncommon. Yet rapidly as they multiplied and 
still multiply, their large families would have been repre- 
sented by an even greater increase but for the somewhat 
high rate of mortality. 

But Canada as it concerns us here and affects the story 
of North America and the British Empire must not be 
judged by its exports, its imports, or its population. At 
the time of the conquest, apart from its extraordinary 
interest as a unique example of French experiment in over- 
sea statesmanship and colonisation, we have only to re- 
member that as a military factor it had proved a match for 
and a thorn in the side of the thirteen British-American 
colonies, and as an outpost of French power had aspired to 
a predominant place in North America. Finally, when its 
chief stronghold fell, the bells of England rang with a fervour 
that would alone have been a significant tribute to its im- 
portance. The decision to retain Canada embodied, no 
doubt, the opinion of the majority in England, and in the 
Treaty of Paris the King undertook to give the most 



INTRODUCTORY 17 

effectual orders that his new subjects should enjoy the 
fullest privileges of the Roman Catholic religion compatible 
with their allegiance as British subjects. It continued the 
priests in their offices, and guaranteed quiet possession of 
all property, lay and clerical, but that of the Jesuits. In 
regard to the laws, which were those generally known as the 
Coutome de Paris, and of immemorial use in Canada, there 
was great anxiety. The Statute and Proclamation of 1763 
in no way allayed this, as it directed the establishment of 
Courts ' as nearly conformable as may be to the laws of 
England.' It provided also for ' the calling of Assemblies 
as used and directed in those colonies and provinces in 
America which are under our immediate government.' This 
is vague, and with a knowledge of the peculiar difficulties 
surrounding the situation, was doubtless intended to be. 
What is known in Canada as ' The rule of the soldiers ' termi- 
nated in the autumn of 1763, when civil law took its place, 
and General Murray, to the loudly expressed satisfaction 
of the French Canadians, remained and took his seat as 
Governor in matters both ecclesiastical and civil. 



18 THE MAKING OF CANADA 



CHAPTER II 

CANADA UNDER MURRAY 

Canada was now fairly started on her career as a British 
colony. The concessions granted to Canadians in the 
matter of their religion had given great umbrage to the 
New Englanders, who were nothing if not Protestant, while 
the British traders, mainly from these provinces, who had 
settled after the conquest in Quebec and Montreal, were 
still more dissatisfied, as they had expected to form in 
themselves a small party of ascendency in matters both 
ecclesiastical and civil. They had endured as a disagree- 
able necessity the interval of military rule, but the attitude 
of the soldiers and of Murray towards the French Canadians 
had been little to their liking, and now that the stamp of 
approval had been set on the military Governor by retaining 
him as a civil one, they foresaw what they conceived to be 
further slights, and girded themselves to assert what they 
regarded as their just dues. 

But some months before the Proclamation of October 7, '63, 
and less than three after the signing of the Treaty of Paris, 
there broke out that great Indian war which fills two volumes 
of Parkman's stirring prose, under the heading of ' The Con- 
spiracy of Pontiac.' Even the historian reasonably familiar 
with the long procession of events that make up the tale 
of European dominion in North America is pulled up at 
times during those two solitary decades of universal British 
dominion by a temporary lack of boundaries and definitions. 
Hitherto the former had at least been roughly outlined by 
the claim, albeit a disputed one, of two hostile nations, while 



CANADA UNDER MURRAY 19 

a little later they were to become familiar to the very school- 
boy on his map. But the spectacle of a British Commander- 
in-Chief at New York, responsible for British red-coats far 
away in the late French trading-posts and near by the site 
of modern Chicago, must always seem a strange interlude. 
Yet this, after all, was only the natural situation in 1763, 
and is a sufficient reason why the war of Pontiac, that last 
great combination of the western and northern tribes to re- 
pulse the advancing wave of settlement, forms no essential 
part of the story I have set myself to tell. And this is well, 
for the former has been told in an inimitable and final 
fashion, delightful alike to the schoolboy and the serious 
student, while the other as a connected narrative has found 
no chronicler between the extremes of many-volumed works 
of reference and the brief chapter or two that is its portion 
in a general history. No fighting in Pontiac's war worth 
mentioning actually took place on what afterwards became 
Canadian territory, though the long and dramatic defence 
of Detroit by Major Gladwin is its most notable incident. 
But this Indian rising was the result, nevertheless, of the 
conquest of Canada. Relieved from the French terror, the 
traders and land hunters of the British provinces which had 
as yet no western boundaries pressed thick upon the edge of 
the Indian country beyond the Ohio ; an inevitable eventu- 
ality, no doubt, but at that time of confusion after the long 
French war, and as yet unsettled boundaries and agreements 
between the provinces, terribly premature. It affected 
Canada inasmuch as militia and supplies were forwarded 
from thence up the lakes, and in yet another sense was 
associated with the old French province. For, heady and 
reckless as were these British pioneers in their approach, 
the evil and the portent of their coming were made every 
use of by the French traders and settlers in the west, natur- 
ally sore at the humiliation involved by the recent hauling 
down of the French flag and the admission of British garri- 
sons. In short, these French backwoodsmen could pro- 
claim, what was only too true, namely, that while they 



20 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

themselves injured the Indians in no sense, but on the con- 
trary intermarried with them, bought their pelts and coveted 
nothing of their lands beyond a patch for maize and vege- 
tables, the advent of the English settler meant destruction 
of the game and ultimately of the tribes who depended upon 
it. They circulated a good deal, however, that had no such 
basis of truth ; such, for instance, as the evergreen romance 
that the Indians' late father Onontio had been only taking 
a rest and was coming, nay, had actually landed with an 
overpowering French force to drive the British out of Canada. 

It was characteristic of most of the provinces whose im- 
patient adventurers had caused the trouble, that they could 
barely be induced to contribute a man or a dollar to the 
expeditionary forces so directly needed to overcome it, 
but even refused accommodation or decent treatment to 
the hapless troops who were there to defend them. The 
voluminous correspondence of the many admirable and by 
now war-worn and experienced British officers, who had to 
preserve the country, teems with anathema and despair at 
the attitude of those they were sent to protect. Bouquet, 
that able Swiss colonel, than whom in all these wars 
Britain had no more devoted servant, launches out again 
and again into what for his sober pen is the most unusual 
luxury of invective. 

How in June of 1763 he won the two hardly fought fields 
on two consecutive days of Edge Hill and Bushy Run, and 
how the disciplined British regular showed, and not by any 
means only there, that with a little experience of bush 
fighting, he was after all, when in actual contact with the 
most resolute savages, the staunchest of any white men, is a 
familiar story. All this, accompanied by the constant fear 
of the defalcation of the formidable Six Nations, held in 
check by Sir William Johnson, the capture of a half-score 
of lonely posts with the attendant horrors, the widespread 
panic and massacre on the frontier settlements, as I have 
remarked, does not directly concern us. The matter may 
be dismissed with the reminder that the flame of war was 



CANADA UNDER MURRAY 21 

lit from Machillimackinac, near the foot of Lake Superior, 
to the middle reaches of the Mississippi, that the renowned 
Pontiac, who took up the hatchet at Detroit in 1763, fell in 
1765 by some mysterious hand within easy reach of New 
Orleans. Yet Canada, remote though she was from these 
sanguinary scenes, was collectively perhaps the greatest 
sufferer by them. For the western fur trade was still to her 
the very breath of life, and Pontiac's war strangled it for the 
time at its source. 

The Proclamation of 1763, and perhaps inevitably so, was 
a little vague. It divided the new territory acquired in 
North America into four governments, the two Floridas 
and Grenada in the south, and that of Quebec in the north, 
respectively. The eastern boundaries of the latter were 
defined as against those of New England, Nova Scotia, and 
the Hudson Bay territory, but in the far west its civil 
jurisdiction was left for the present undetermined, and gave 
some colour to the complaints of the other colonies, that 
the religious and civil concessions made to the French 
might apply automatically to virgin lands actually in the 
rear of the English provinces. Such fears, admissible in 
theory on the part of over ready and censorious critics, were 
not likely to be fulfilled in practice. In fact, Great Britain 
had scarcely yet had time to get breath after the exertions 
of her titanic and triumphant struggle. Had she chosen 
the short stern method, such as any other power of that 
time would most undoubtedly have adopted, and actually 
desired by most of her own self-governing colonies — annexed 
Canada, that is to say, without conditions, and governed her 
handful of people as a conqueror of their own race would 
probably have governed hers in like situation — the matter 
would have been simple. Frontenac's intentions, if he had 
succeeded in his attempt on New York, it may be remem- 
bered, was to forcibly deport the inhabitants of that and the 
neighbouring provinces. 

But Great Britain chose the nobler part, even to offending 
her own colonial subjects, and it was no easy part to play. 



22 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

Nor was it by any means in the French province alone that 
her difficulties lay. Three distinct races on thorny terms with 
one another had to be dealt with, the French, the Indians, 
and her own people, each of them concerned wholly with 
their own interests, and two of them in a violent hurry. 
The British military officials, after years of warfare with 
and against the Red man, had, Heaven knows, no cause to 
love him, and their letters teem with disgust at the horrors 
they had constantly to witness. But they recognised his 
claims to an existence in his own country, and still more 
perhaps, not being land speculators, felt the madness of 
arousing him to justifiable vengeance. 

The others, however, were inclined to think that the 
Indian had no rights, the more so as, if peradventure they 
should stir him up, the British Government would do most 
of the fighting, and pay for it. 

But the French Canadians at any rate were not in a hurry. 
They were tired, and on the whole pleasantly surprised with 
their lot. Murray had his coming troubles, but his earliest 
ones in Quebec, strange to say, came from his own nation. 
The first of them was soon over, and was sufficiently 
serious, but calls for some measure of sympathy. The 
other was not dangerous, but abiding, and will probably 
not excite the reader's sympathy at all unless perhaps for 
Murray ; but then we are not New Englanders of the 
eighteenth century. 

For while George the Third and his Government were 
squandering thousands on unworthy legislators and syco- 
phants, and in an unworthy cause, they selected this 
moment to exercise economy in the matter of their soldiers' 
wages. The mute heroes of many campaigns, who had 
driven the French from America and fought Indians through 
mosquito-haunted swamps in broiling summer days, were to 
be made to pay for their rations, hitherto free, at the rate of 
fourpence a day. Moved with indignation, the troops in 
Quebec assembled en masse, but without arms, before the Cha- 
teau St. Louis, and made complaint to the Governor. Some 



CANADA UNDER MURRAY 23 

civilians, who upbraided the men, were pelted with stones, 
which fetched out the officers with drawn swords. Upon 
this the men ran to the barracks, siezed their arms, formed 
in order, and, with beat of drum, moved towards the St. 
John's Gate. Murray himself now went among them, but 
to his appeals they replied that they would march to 
Amherst, the Commander-in-Chief, at New York, and lay 
their arms at his feet. They spoke with pride and respect 
of their officers, nor was any one drunk, but the excitement 
was intense. The town-major, however, managed to close 
the gates, which created a panic lest the troops should 
mutineer and loot the city. Murray now persuaded them 
to march to the adjoining parade-ground, and earnestly 
besought them to remember their cloth, and return quietly 
to barracks. Addressing the officers, he dwelt on the cer- 
tainty of a mutiny in Quebec spreading to the other gar- 
risons, if successful, and the catastrophe thereby involved. 
Ordering a general parade, he again urged the men to obedi- 
ence. They replied in praise of their officers, but resolutely 
refused to pay for their food. The night passed quietly, 
and on the next morning, September 20, Murray told his 
officers that they must compel obedience to the obnoxious 
order, or die in the attempt, and the day was spent by them 
in fruitless attempts to talk their men round. On the next 
day a general parade was ordered, and the matter had to be 
put to the test. Murray, after reminding the men again of 
' the enormity of their crime,' declared his fixed resolution, 
and that of his faithful officers, to compel them to sub- 
mission, or perish in the attempt. He then went to the 
head of Amherst's grenadiers, he writes, ' determined to put 
to death the first man who should disobey. Thank God I 
was not reduced to that horrid necessity.' The whole com- 
pany, followed by the entire body of troops, submitted, and 
marched quietly between the royal standards placed for 
the purpose, and back to barracks. So ended a mutiny 
that, if it had been met with less courage, would almost 
certainly have spread and reduced his Majesty's forces in 



24 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

North America, where labour was scarce, and escape easy, 
to the numbers of those who held his Majesty's commission, 
and a few sergeants. 

The other trouble begun under Murray's rule will be with 
us more or less for the next few chapters. It was caused 
by the community of British traders, mainly from New 
England, spoken of in a preceding page as having settled 
in Quebec, and found things not by any means up to their 
expectations. Though provision was made in the treaty 
and proclamation for summoning an elective assembly, it 
was undoubtedly intended to convey the power only to do 
so, rather than the actual adoption of so serious a measure 
in a colony utterly unprepared for anything of the kind. 
The actual government set up was that of a ' Crown colony,' 
to make use of a generally understood term, of a Governor, 
that is to say, acting with the advice of a nominated 
Council. This consisted at first of only eight members, not 
one of whom was a French Catholic, a fact at this early 
period not apparently resented, nor likely to be. British 
rule had been unprecedentedly benignant. The French 
are at least a logical people, and the ethics of that period 
saw nothing strange in the withholding of office from the 
conquered before the conquerors had been given time to 
set their house in order. The most enduring name, and 
probably the ablest man of the number, was Dr. Mabane, a 
Scotch army surgeon. A Chief-Justice and Attorney-General 
had been despatched from England to ensure the best legal 
assistance to the new Government. Like most of such 
appointments in those days, they were doubtless pure jobs. 
As neither could speak a word of French, and according to 
Murray, who had no personal dislike to them, were quite 
ignorant of the world, they were somewhat worse than 
useless, and their names not worth recording. The pro- 
clamation had ordained that both the civil and criminal 
law of England should become the Canadian code, nor was 
any disability of race or religion to be regarded in selecting 
juries. It was further specified that purely English cases 



CANADA UNDER MURRAY 25 

should be tried by English, and French cases by French 
juries, and that when the litigants were of the opposite 
races, the jury also should be equally divided. A Court of 
King's Bench, sitting twice a year at Quebec, was established, 
with appeal over a certain sum to the Governor and King 
respectively. Once a year the Chief-Justice was to hold 
assizes at Three Rivers and Montreal, while a Court of 
Common Pleas was established, with recourse to a jury if 
demanded by either party. 

Justices of the peace were appointed throughout the 
country to adjudicate cases involving small amounts ; three 
such justices to form a quorum for quarter-sessions in 
amounts under £30, while two were to sit weekly in Quebec 
and Montreal respectively. This all sounds very simple 
and satisfactory. The English criminal code was from the 
first accepted with little demur from the fact that it was 
more merciful than that which had hitherto obtained. As 
for the rest, something like chaos set in from the very first, 
and none the less so that the habitant, released from the 
cares of war and in other respects relegated to a somewhat 
freer existence, soon began to display the litigiousness that 
has ever since distinguished him. The difference between 
French and English law was profound ; the population who 
were to be submitted to the change were ignorant, simple, 
and stubborn ; while the interpreters, who were intrusted with 
a task that might have tested the legal and judicial abilities 
of a Napoleon, were utterly unfitted by training and sym- 
pathy to grapple with it, nor had they even the necessary 
lingual equipment. The seigniors objected to the jury 
system on aristocratic grounds, misliking the confinement 
of a jury-box in company with butchers, shoemakers, and 
their own tenants. The latter grudged the time, and had no 
hereditary faculty for weighing evidence. The English laws 
concerning land and inheritance clashed utterly with the 
complicated seignioral system. The fees were all fixed 
upon the scale of a wealthy country, whereas the standard 
of Canada in this respect had naturally been an extremely 



26 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

low one. Most of the money left in the country after the 
war was a currency of stamped cards issued by the late 
French Government, the redemption of which by the latter 
was still a matter of such doubt and procrastination that 
much of it had passed into the hands of speculators at a 
ruinous discount, though Murray made every attempt to 
stop the traffic. The instructions sent from England and 
the men responsible for carrying them out suggested the 
picture of a virgin country, a people without a past, and 
minds blank upon such subjects, and ready to absorb any 
kind of beneficent legislation. Indeed, the very term 
* infant colony ' frequently used in this connection illustrates 
the temper in which a well-meaning British Government set 
about the task. Here, on the contrary, were an ancient 
people, peculiarly wedded to their immemorial customs, 
presenting a solid front of adamant to a strange code 
written and delivered in a language they did not under- 
stand. The situation was not without humour, but it took 
a little time in so simple a society to create the impasse 
that arose later. Murray writes to the Lords of Trade in 
October 1764, that very little will satisfy the 'new subjects 
(French), but nothing will satisfy the licentious fanatics 
(British traders) save the expulsion of the Canadians, the 
bravest race on the globe, who, if indulged with a few privi- 
leges, will become the most faithful men in this American 
Empire. Unless Canadians have judges and lawyers who 
understand them, his Majesty will lose the greater part of 
this valuable people.' In his despair at the appointments 
worked by interest in London, he protests against three 
proposed additions to his Council of this kind, mentioning 
their names. ' The first is a notorious smuggler, the second 
a weak man of little character, the third a conceited boy.' 

As regards the ' licentious fanatics,' the political feature of 
Murray's, as of later administrations, was the attitude of the 
British trading community in the cities of Quebec and 
Montreal. In 1764 they consisted of about two hundred 
adults in all, doubling their number in the next three years. 



CANADA UNDER MURRAY 27 

As already stated, they seem to have come in considerable 
part from the New England colonies, and in possession of 
most of such trade as had developed since the war, fully 
expected to govern not merely the French but his Majesty's 
representative himself, as had been more or less the custom 
in their native colonies. They fell foul at once of the whole 
scheme of Canadian government, and particularly of Murray, 
as its representative. The latter by no means suffered 
them gladly, but in his despatches calls them so many other 
names besides those mentioned, that one scents a bitter 
quarrel, and would discount more of his abuse if it were not 
that his successor, the temperate Carleton, followed in the 
same strain. The Georgian officer and the New England 
Republican of secondary condition were not indeed calcu- 
lated to esteem each other, even had their views on public 
affairs not clashed so hopelessly. These earliest British 
settlers in Canada, though the great influx of after years 
seems to obscure their claims to be the nucleus of English 
Canada, at any rate demand equitable consideration at the 
hands of the fair-minded chronicler. We know their 
opinion of themselves, namely, that they were the salt and 
prop of the colony ; we know also the opinion of Murray 
and his friends, which held them as the scum of the earth. 
We know their names, too, quite well, for they were con- 
stantly petitioning the Crown, but nothing more about 
most of them. One gathers that they were struggling men 
of small capital, though Murray denies them even that much. 
They doubtless had great difficulties to encounter, as well 
as slights to put up with, and one in a measure sympathises 
with their grievances if one puts oneself in their position 
with the point of view almost inevitable to it. But this is 
not easy, even for the most unprejudiced historian. Their 
leading idea was to keep the French down, even to the 
harassing of their faith, while enjoying themselves the 'full 
privileges of British subjects ' ; an elective assembly, that is 
to say, chosen from the two hundred, by which they could 
govern their eighty thousand fellow-subjects and the 



28 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

Governor to boot. They were indignant when they found 
that these things were not to be. Had they been, Canada 
beyond doubt would have become the fourteenth State of the 
Union. 

If there had been twenty,or even ten, thousand such zealots, 
if they had represented a large share of the industry and 
substance of the colony, and lifted it to a conspicuous com- 
mercial position in the world, it would have been utterly 
different, a remark not altogether uncalled for, seeing how 
apt are Englishmen to draw analogies in colonial experi- 
ments and experiences where there are absolutely none. But 
of these people, as I have said, there were not ten nor twenty 
thousand, but about two hundred, mostly obscure and rarely 
substantial men, for there was as yet little to tempt another 
sort. The first breeze was at the Quebec Quarter-Sessions, 
in October 1764, when the Grand Jury, largely composed of 
British traders, interpolated their presentment with several 
clauses so irrelevant to the business in hand and to their 
position as Grand Jurors, that the astonished Chief-Justices 
felt called upon to remind them somewhat sharply of the 
purpose for which they were convened. This remarkable 
pronouncement maintained that the Grand Jury ought to be 
consulted before any ordinance of the Government passed 
into law, and the public accounts of the colony ought to 
be laid before them twice a year. It demanded a better 
observance of the Sabbath Day, and that it should not be 
profaned by buying and selling or idle amusements, and 
called for a learned clergy to preach the Gospel to the 
French. It furthermore declared that the Courts of Justice 
established by the Governor in Council were unconstitu- 
tional. Fourteen of the twenty jurymen were British, and 
by way of making themselves pleasant to the six French- 
men who had signed the main clauses without understand- 
ing them, thirteen of these added a supplement protesting 
against Roman Catholics sitting on juries as 'in open viola- 
tion of our most sacred laws and liberty, tending to the 
entire subversion of the Protestant religion and his Majesty's 



CANADA UNDER MURRAY 29 

authority/ The fourteenth British juror apparently had 
the saving grace of humour, or possibly saw visions in his 
thrifty mind of himself and his two hundred compatriots 
doing jury duty for the whole colony ! As justice without 
juries was unthinkable to the stalwart New Englander, and, 
moreover, as most of these men are said to have known 
scarcely any French, this proposition seems lacking in 
ordinary sanity, and goes far to confirm Murray's estimate 
of his troublesome neighbours as men possessing, in addition 
to most other vices, * but a mean intelligence.' When the six 
French jurors were furnished with a translation of the 
document they had put their signature to, they were greatly 
upset. So much so, that they forwarded a petition to the 
King complaining of the trick they had been played, sup- 
porting Murray's institution of law-courts, praying against 
their exclusion as jurors on account of their faith, and 
begging that French advocates and notaries should be per- 
mitted to practise according to their ancient law, for there 
was not an English lawyer in the country who understood 
French. 

Murray sent an account of the business to England. 
There were one hundred and forty-four of these persons in 
Quebec, he said, and fifty-six in Montreal, not ten of whom 
were freeholders, but as Protestants they had tried to usurp 
the government of eighty thousand French Canadians. The 
performance of the Quebec Grand Jury generally, and par- 
ticularly their fraudulent method of obtaining French signa- 
tures, was duly censured by the King in Council, and Murray 
was furthermore instructed 'to give notice that his Majesty 
will give the utmost attention and consideration to proper 
representations from his Canadian subjects, and will cause 
to be removed every grievance of which they may have just 
reason to complain.' 

A legislative Assembly was for the present out of the ques- 
tion. A mixed House would not have been tolerated by the 
British community even if workable, while the latter's pre- 
posterous scheme was, of course, unthinkable except to some 



30 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

sons of liberty from Boston or Salem. The noblesse, satis- 
fied for the present, though their exclusion from offices 
formerly held by them was not unfelt, had no interest what- 
ever in popular assemblies, and would have objected to any 
that included their social inferiors. The peasantry did not 
even know the meaning of the term, and it was some years 
before they could be persuaded to take the faintest interest 
in such questions. The clergy, it need hardly be said, had 
no spark of enthusiasm for such a departure, and clerical 
matters pursued their old course. Still, affairs wore a 
generally unsettled aspect, and some anxiety was manifested 
as to the future. The concessions granted to the Catholic 
Church had been coupled with the proviso of ' so far as the 
laws of Great Britain permit,' and the pressure of French- 
bred or French-educated priests raised a serious point for 
the British Government. France herself during the treaty 
negotiations had made some attempts to preserve a quasi- 
official supervision over certain Canadian Church appoint- 
ments which met with a prompt refusal from the British 
minister. It was obvious that a stream of French ecclesias- 
tics flowing into Canada would encourage a retrospective 
state of mind among the people, even when it did not 
unsettle them with anticipations of a future reversion to 
their old ties with the mother-church and the mother- 
country, which was more than likely, as merely human. 

Two hundred and seventy persons, including women and 
children, French officials, and members of the noblesse 
chiefly, had returned to France under the agreement. Many 
of the latter, however, held commissions in French regiments, 
and others were promised them. This exodus has been 
much exaggerated. Murray thought it extremely small, and 
had ships available for many times the number. Moreover, 
those already in or about to join French regiments would 
assuredly prefer such a career to remaining without one at 
home, and their action was probably not determined by any 
abstract objection to staying in Canada. The Bishop, how- 
ever, and a few of the clergy had left, and the colony was 



CANADA UNDER MURRAY 31 

now without a Prelate, and remained so for some years. The 
Jesuits were the only religious order definitely excepted 
from the Convention. Though they had a good deal of 
property, the body itself was represented in Canada by a 
mere handful of aged brethren, at whose death the estates 
were to be vested in the Crown, as was hoped, for educational 
purposes. The maintenance of a proper supply of parish 
priests, depending for the moment on the local product, which 
was both insufficient and in some respects inadequate, was one 
of the many difficulties that arose hydra-headed around a 
Government that by the very liberality of its intentions was 
facing an experiment unprecedented at that epoch. Laval's 
great foundation at Quebec, with its offshoot at Montreal, 
was not yet what it afterwards became. It had long been 
the Seminary of youth, who when intended for the priest- 
hood passed into the latter through the Jesuits' College. 
The teaching of the Jesuits, however, was now suppressed, 
and their buildings converted into barracks for the troops. 
Though the Seminary soon began to take up the work, there 
was a considerable hiatus. Not for six years was there any 
Bishop, so ordination was suspended. The Dean and Chapter 
of Quebec bestirred themselves under the Abbe Lacorne, 
who mooted the matter in London, itself putting forward a 
candidate unacceptable to the Crown. Finally, with Mur- 
ray's full approval, Monsignor Briant, a Canadian cleric, then 
in France, was consecrated Bishop at Paris, and arrived in 
Canada apparently upon the very day of Murray's departure 
— a modest, tactful man, avoiding the personal pomp and 
ceremonial observed by those Bishops of Quebec in the 
ancient regime, who had contended for civil power with 
Governors, and held spiritual sway from the cold capes of 
Gaspe to the mouths of the Mississippi. The Head of the 
Church in Canada under the new regime had a much more 
difficult, if less showy, part to play for the next half-century. 
As the unofficial, but no less vital, prop of a Government 
out of sympathy with his race and religion, his integrity and 
loyalty of character were a matter of vital moment to the 



32 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

Crown. The influence of the priests in the hundred and 
twenty parishes of the province was unbounded, while the 
power of the bishop in an Ultramontane Catholic Church 
over the priests needs no emphasising. As we shall see, 
though there were trying moments, the Canadian bishops 
failed nothing in their loyalty till the French Revolution 
relieved them for ever of all temptation to look backward. 

Murray, it will be remembered, had two Lieutenant- 
Governors within his administration over whom he had no 
military authority. That of Three Rivers was soon dis- 
continued, but Burton at Montreal, who was nursing a sore 
head from some disappointment in promotion, vented his 
ill-humour on his superior and made himself unpleasant. 
But Montreal itself was also in due course abolished as a 
civil department, and future Governors of Quebec were hence- 
forth relieved from the pin-pricks of touchy subordinates. 

Murray had of a truth troubles enough. The trade of 
Canada under the navigation laws had, of course, come 
within the English system. But the old traffic in French 
goods was not likely to be suppressed when the English 
colonies themselves had reduced smuggling to a science. 
The islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, left to France by 
the late treaty, now proved most convenient centres of dis- 
posal for French goods, which were freely despatched thence 
both to New England and to Canada. But the Protestant 
stalwarts of Quebec were as difficult to suppress as the 
smugglers, and more formidable both to Murray and the 
peace of the country. Finally, they petitioned for his recall 
with a long list of grievances, which was supported by the 
mercantile houses in London with whom they trafficked, and 
to whom they probably owed money. One of their com- 
plaints ran that Murray had suggested the appointment of 
some judges who could speak French ; another that he did 
not attend church with sufficient regularity ! They were at 
length successful, not in disgracing their enemy, but in 
bringing about his recall to explain the causes of friction to 
his Government. 



CANADA UNDER MURRAY 33 

The French, however, ' were penetrated with grief at the 
departure of his Excellency, whom, since the conquest of 
the Province, they have loved and respected even more on 
account of his personal qualities than as their Governor, and 
they would be unworthy to live if they did not make known 
to the King and the whole of England the obligations they 
owe him, which they will never forget, and the sincere 
regret they feel at his departure.' Murray left Canada in 
June 1766 to give an account of his stewardship, or more 
literally, perhaps, to discuss with the Home Government the 
complications which must already have struck them as per- 
taining to the administration of their recently acquired 
dominion. He never returned. Probably he had never 
intended to. Seven laborious years of continuous residence 
through peace and war was no light performance; and he 
had striven faithfully. He was a man of fortune, and had 
no material motives for clinging to a colonial governorship. 
That his Government were grateful seems likely enough 
from the fact that he retained his office for nearly two more 
years, his successor at Quebec serving for that time as 
Lieutenant-Governor. He died in Great George Street nearly 
thirty years later as M.P. for Perth and Colonel of the 72nd 
Regiment, and appears to have seen no more active service. 
Very possibly he was disabled for it, since, according to the 
Annual Register, when his body was embalmed after death it 
was found to contain several bullets received on the battle- 
fields of Europe and America. So if he was short-tempered 
at times with the Protestant faction in Quebec, as they com- 
plain in their royal petition, one may fairly credit him with 
a reasonable excuse for irritability. 

A series of letters from Canada during Murray's adminis- 
tration and for a little afterwards give an interesting account 
of the lighter side of social life there among the French and 
English of the higher sort. The ladies of the former, says 
the writer, who is quite free, apparently, from insular pre- 
judices, are gay, coquettish, and sprightly, more gallant than 
sensible, more flattered by the vanity of inspiring passion 

C 



34 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

than capable of feeling it themselves. They are better 
educated, however, than the. men of their class, very few of 
the seigniors being able to write much more than their own 
names — a failing, however, which at that day in that country, 
from its peculiar traditions, did not probably detract from 
their social eligibility. The ladies led the English officers 
captive apparently in wholesale fashion. At Montreal the 
irresistible charmers drove about the town with one always 
in attendance, while on the St. Foy road leading out of 
Quebec every summer afternoon forty or fifty calashes with 
pretty women in them could be counted. According to the 
writer, an Englishwoman who mixed apparently like the 
other English ladies of the garrison at that time freely with 
them, they had no consciousness of the natural beauty of 
their surroundings, and many had never even seen the Falls 
of Montmorency, almost within sight. It was the fashion, 
too, to take the air by sauntering on the Battery ; dress, 
admiration and religion constituting the life of a Quebec 
lady of that period, who was lively and handsome rather 
than pretty. The gentlemen never rode on horseback, 
being always driven in a calash, yet the number of horses 
kept by every family, even the habitants, struck this ob- 
server as remarkable. She was told that there were two 
ladies in the province who read books. They were both 
over fifty, and were considered to be prodigies of learning. 
We have a pleasant picture of a water journey from Mont- 
real to Quebec, with a band of music on the vessel, and an 
adjournment each night to the house of the seignior of the 
district, where they were entertained to supper and a dance ; 
while a ball at Government House is described as consisting 
of a hundred women and three hundred men. Beaver-skin 
coats were worn in winter, and buffalo robes for driving, 
as in recent times till the buffalo was killed out. The 
ladies in winter wore long cloaks, ' like English market 
women/ with hoods, sometimes black and sometimes red. 
The dress of the habitant then, as for some generations 
afterwards, was the grey homespun capot or frock enclosed 



CANADA UNDER MURRAY 35 

at the waist with a red sash, a woollen or fox-skin cap in 
winter and straw hat in summer, with moccasins for shoes. 
The women on week-days wore a cap, a stiff petticoat, a 
mantelot, and moccasins ; on Sundays, we are told, they 
dressed in ' English fashion/ though much more gaudily. 
The extreme comfort of the habitant struck every visitor 
at that time, and even then protests against the epithets of 
1 bleak and barren/ as commonly applied to Canada in 
Europe, were feebly raised. There were three or four good 
rooms in every peasant's house, and the heads of the family 
at any rate had always linen sheets and curtained beds. 
The tremendous heat at which the habitants kept their 
stove- warmed rooms struck the visitor of 1760 as it strikes 
the visitor of modern times with horror. Then too, perhaps 
even more than now, the gaiety, the love of song and dance 
and social meetings with which they beguiled so cheerfully 
the long dead hours of their snow-bound winter, was a thing 
of common remark. To the English eye, and still more, no 
doubt, to the British colonial eye, the men seemed lazy and 
the women industrious. This meant no more than that they 
made their living easily in a country which the outside 
world had decided with slight authority was hardly fit to 
live in ! 



36 THE MAKING OF CANADA 



CHAPTER III 

CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT: 1766-1774 

It is remarkable as well as fortunate that, during the first 
thirty-six years of English rule, Canada was in the hands of 
only three Governors, and that all of them were men above 
the common stamp. For it was of all her epochs the one 
when such men were most needed ; not merely because the 
times were all agog and dangers within and without almost 
constantly present, but no stable local material had yet 
been formed on which a pro-consul could lean for support. 
Prejudice and self-interest, or at least self-protection, were 
the springs that moved men and factions. There had 
been time for neither experience nor training in public life. 
A people who had never before experienced official con- 
sideration suddenly found themselves objects of solicitude 
at the hands of their Government, and in a sense taken into 
its confidence. If the novelty gratified them, it at the same 
time bred certain suspicions in their untutored minds, while 
an alien minority, traditionally familiar with the habits of 
politics and agitation, were not for a long time good speci- 
mens of their type. They had all its critical and aggressive 
qualities, with little of the ballast and sense of proportion 
which belongs to the better sort of Briton. In these early 
times the Governor of Canada had to be an autocrat or 
nothing, and for whatever happened, to him belonged the 
praise or blame. 

When Murray reached home his first care was to prepare a 
full account of the condition of the province, and his report 
lies in the Haldemand collection. It is a lengthy document, 



CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 37 

and interesting as the production of a capable Briton who, 
so far as a knowledge of Canada was concerned, was better 
qualified than almost any of his contemporaries at that time, 
to give an account of it. He describes the Canadians as a 
frugal, industrious, and moral race, who from the just and 
mild treatment they had received from his Majesty's mili- 
tary officers in charge of the country for nearly four years 
after the war, had greatly got the better of such natural 
antipathy as they had towards their conquerors. 'The 
noblesse,' he says, ' pique themselves upon the antiquity of 
their families, their own military glory and that of their 
ancestors, and though not rich are generally in a situation, 
in that plentiful part of the world where money is scarce 
and luxury still unknown, to support their dignity. Their 
tenants, who pay only an annual quit-rent of about a dollar 
for one hundred acres, are at their ease and comfortable. 
They have been accustomed to respect their superiors, and, 
not yet intoxicated with the abuse of liberty, are shocked at 
the insults which their noblesse and the King's officers have 
received from the English traders and lawyers since the 
civil government took effect. They are very ignorant, for 
it was the policy of the French Government to keep them 
so. Few or none can read, nor was printing permitted in 
Canada till the British occupation.' Murray himself had 
imported a printing press from Philadelphia, together with 
a printer who had recently started the Quebec Gazette. 

He goes on to speak of the veneration for the priesthood, 
who, however, are of mean birth and likely to deteriorate 
intellectually now that the supply from France is cut off. 
' Disorders and divisions could not be avoided in attempting 
to establish civil government agreeable to my instructions. 
Magistrates had to be made and juries composed from four 
hundred and fifty contemptible sutlers and traders [the 
number at the close of his time]. It would be unreasonable 
to suppose that such men would not be intoxicated with the 
unexpected power put into their hands and not be eager to 
show how amply they possessed it. The improper choice 



38 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

and the number of civil officers sent over from England 
increased the disquietude of the colony. Instead of men 
of genius and untainted morals, the reverse were appointed 
to the most important offices, under whom it was impos- 
sible to communicate those impressions of the dignity of 
government by which alone mankind can be held together 
in society. The Judge pitched upon to conciliate the minds 
of seventy-five thousand foreigners to the laws and govern- 
ment of Great Britain, was taken from a gaol, entirely 
ignorant of civil law and the language of the people. 
The offices of Secretary of the Province, Registrar, Clerk 
of the Council, Commissary of Stores, Provost-Marshal, 
etc. etc., were given by patent to men in England who let 
them out to the highest bidder with so little consideration 
for the capacity of their representatives that not one of 
them understood the language of the natives. As no salary 
was annexed to these places, they depended upon fees which 
I was ordered to establish equal to those in the richest 
ancient colonies, and the rapacity which followed was 
severely felt by the poor Canadians. But they patiently 
submitted. They cheerfully obeyed the Stamp Act, though 
stimulated to resistance by some licentious traders from 
New York.' In regard to the complaints made against him, 
which he had answered elsewhere, Murray concludes : ' I 
glory in having been accused of warmth and firmness in pro- 
tecting the King's Canadian subjects and of doing the 
utmost in my power to gain to my royal master the affec- 
tions of that brave, hardy people, whose emigration, if ever 
it shall happen, will be an irreparable loss to the Empire, to 
prevent which I declare to your Lordships I would cheer- 
fully submit to greater calumnies and indignities, if greater 
can be desired, than hitherto I have undergone.' 

Murray's successor, or to be precise his deputy, as he 
remained titular Governor for two more years, was the 
greatest, as well as by far the longest in office of all 
Canadian Viceroys during an epoch in which the personal 
qualities of those high functionaries were of vital con- 



CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 39 

sequence to the state they administered. Sir Guy Carleton, 
afterwards Lord Dorchester, stands unquestionably first 
upon the long list in the minds of Canadians, French or 
English. In Great Britain his name rarely conveys any mean- 
ing even to the well-informed, though to him we probably 
owe the fact that Canada now flies the British flag. 

Guy Carleton was an Anglo-Irishman, like so many of our 
famous soldiers, and came of a landed family in co. Down. 
An active and distinguished officer, he had also been a close 
friend of Wolfe, and the latter had persisted, in face of the 
opposition of the King, whom Carleton had indirectly 
offended, in taking him to Quebec, not for friendship's 
sake, but for his abilities. Here he was quartermaster- 
general, but was also invaluable for his engineering skill, 
and was wounded on the Plains of Abraham. Previous 
to this he had won credit in Germany, and won still more 
subsequently at Havana, where he was severely wounded. 

Like Murray, Carleton was still a bachelor, a failing for a 
Colonial Governor that he most effectually remedied later 
on. On arriving at Quebec, where Colonel Irving, a leading 
councillor, had filled his post in the interregnum, he received 
the usual complimentary addresses of welcome, and declared 
in reply his determination to mete out even-handed justice 
irrespective of class or race — no empty sentiment in Carle- 
ton's mouth, for he practised it consistently for twenty 
years. Lord Egremont had been the Secretary of State to 
whom most of Murray's dispatches had been written. The 
more distinguished Shelburne, first Marquis of Lansdowne, 
now became for some three years his official correspondent. 
The new Governor was a man of dignified presence, with a 
cold manner but a warm heart. He had sound judgment, 
a keen sense of justice, and cared nothing for hostile criti- 
cism when in pursuit of it. He was also a hard worker and 
an admirable letter-writer, for which last all students of 
Canadian history should be duly grateful. His Council, who 
had by now settled down somewhat firmly into their seats, 
tested his measure very early. For it seems that the Governor, 



40 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

anxious for information on some special matter, privately- 
summoned only those two or three members qualified to 
give it, whereupon the others sent a written remonstrance 
against what they considered a bad precedent, but excusing 
Carleton for this occasion, since they were informed it 
was an accident. The Governor replied it was nothing of 
the kind ; that he should consult whom he pleased either 
in the Council or out of it, if they were men of good sense, 
truth, and impartial justice, and preferred their duty to the 
King and the tranquillity of his subjects and the good of 
the Province to party zeal and selfish mercenary views. 
There were now twelve members in the Council, an honour 
for the present confined to Protestants, so there was not 
unnaturally a very decided ( tail ' to Carleton's team of 
advisers. Walter Murray, one of those whose opinion had 
not been asked, Carleton writes, was a strolling player. 
Mounier again, an honest trader who will sign anything 
his friends ask him to. The troubles of Canada were at 
present wholly internal and unavoidable, though apparently 
the fears of the French were aggravated by the arrogance of 
the British traders. Religious anxieties had quieted down a 
good deal with the presence of a well-behaved Bishop, but 
the two legal systems were clashing hopelessly, and in this 
vital branch of existence there was something like a dead- 
lock. The rising troubles in the American provinces had not 
yet touched Canada. There could be no valid objection to 
a stamp act in a Crown colony, and the French, who might 
with logic have resented helping to pay the expense of their 
own conquest, had not yet acquired the habit of political 
reasoning or remonstrance and probably felt it very little. 
At any rate Murray had written that they paid it with cheer- 
ful alacrity. 

One great disturbance of a peculiar and mysterious nature, 
however, had shaken the colony from end to end and con- 
tinued into Carleton's time, so much so that it can hardly be 
ignored, and is worthy of mention if only to illustrate the 
cleavages of the time and the rancour caused by them. It 



CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 41 

even reached the London coffee-houses, and fills half a volume 
of MS. correspondence in the State papers. Montreal was 
the scene of the exploit, a city which, while keeping pace 
with Quebec in population and trade, was always more 
prone to disturbance from its remoter situation and its long 
association with the fur trade and those exuberant souls 
engaged in it, both red and white, who periodically for- 
gathered there. This, however, by the way ; for the Walker 
affair was a quarrel, speaking relatively, of aristocrats not of 
coureurs-de-bois or mechanics ; hence the excitement caused. 
The feeling between the new British mercantile community 
and the garrison ran even higher in Montreal than in 
Quebec, and no doubt there were faults on both sides. 
The average British officer was not of a type likely to con- 
ciliate a society of touchy American traders who aspired to 
political monopoly, but were rarely of the social class whose 
daughters he had danced with at Alexandria or New York 
or beneath 'Aunt' Schuyler's hospitable roof at Albany. 
It was from these not unworthy if unpolished and somewhat 
narrow-minded and arrogant souls that the magistrates of 
Montreal had to be appointed after the institution of civil 
government in 1763. The scope for friction and unpleasant- 
ness here prepared will be sufficiently obvious to any man 
of the world, particularly such as have been much about it. 
What further aggravated the situation, both in Quebec and 
Montreal, was the very natural friendliness and social fusion 
between the British officers and their old opponents in the 
field, those of the French Canadian officers and seigniors, 
the term being practically synonymous, who had the means 
and opportunities to share in the social life of the little 
capitols. In these circles there was little real cause for 
soreness. The defeat of the French, almost abandoned as 
they had been by their mother country, was only less glorious 
than victory. Contemporary evidence all agrees in the 
philosophic light-heartedness with which the noblesse, of 
both sexes, accepted ' Le Fortune de guerre ' while they had 
received nothing but good treatment from the victors who, 



42 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

as valiant fellow-soldiers, had every cause to hold them in 
respect. The third element, uncongenial to the others and 
regarded by both with social contempt, while at the same 
time endowed with official and magisterial rank, would not 
have been mortal, as chiefly the natives of democratic 
countries, had they been otherwise than bitter, nor had the 
latter mended the situation by an address to Murray com- 
plaining of the arbitrary imprisonments and exactions they 
had suffered during the military regime. This was merely 
an eighteenth-century Bostonian method of emphasising 
the fact that they had been under a military government, 
the only one possible in a conquered country not yet 
annexed by treaty ; nor had they chosen to remember that 
but for these soldiers they would not have been there at all. 

There had been a more general source of discord too in 
Montreal, which was no one's fault, unless indeed that of the 
over-burdened British Government, who had neglected to 
build or acquire barracks for the troops. This was the ever- 
lasting question of billeting, in the course of which Captain 
Frazer, who was officially responsible for it, had on a certain 
occasion sent an officer to the house of a French Canadian 
where one of the justices lodged. The latter claimed 
exemption by virtue of his office. The exemption, however, 
he was answered, related only to his own rooms not to his 
landlord's house ; and the officer in question, Captain Payne, 
proceeded to immediate occupation. Upon this the justice 
issued a warrant for his arrest, and on his refusal to vacate 
the rooms he was committed to prison for contempt by 
another magistrate, one Walker, a most violent leader in 
that faction. There was now a great commotion, and feeling 
ran prodigiously high, the populace taking sides and the 
soldiers of course supporting their officer with much zeal. 
Frazer wrote to Murray that, unless these magistrates were 
deposed, he should resign his post, whereupon the latter 
were summoned to Quebec by the Governor to explain their 
conduct. 

Walker, though English by birth, had spent many years 



CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 43 

in Boston, where no doubt he had imbibed that spirit of 
freedom which he cultivated in the less congenial air of 
Montreal with all the traditional enthusiasm of a recent 
convert. But he was undoubtedly a man of quarrelsome habit 
and violent temperament, and distinguished himself by an 
exceptionally hostile attitude towards the military. Almost 
on the eve of his departure for Quebec he was seated at 
supper with his wife, when, according to his own depositions, 
the door was forced and he was set upon by several persons 
disguised by crape masks and blackened features. In the 
struggle which ensued his ear was cut off and he was other- 
wise seriously maltreated. Every effort was made to discover 
the perpetrators without avail. Murray issued the strongest 
condemnations of the crime, and offered officially ^"200 
reward for its discovery, while the people of Montreal offered 
a yet larger sum, but no witness could be induced to come 
forward. A little later another serious trouble occurred, on 
some men of the 28th being committed by the magistrates 
to jail, and created such excitement that a mutiny was 
feared. Murray hurried to Montreal and found the citizens 
in a state of panic and in fear of their lives. He stayed a 
month, quieted things down, investigated the recent Walker 
affair and learnt nothing, but he caused the 28th to be 
exchanged for another regiment, their passions having been 
so aroused by the vindictive spirit of the magistrates. 
Walker continued so insolent that even his brother magis- 
trates refused to sit with him, and finally Murray dismissed 
him from the bench. He possessed influence in England, 
however, and worked it so skilfully that the Government 
were entirely imposed upon, and to Murray's disgust ordered 
his immediate restoration, with other signs of favour, which 
made him yet more intolerable. It appears from the corre- 
spondence to have been mainly this affair of Walker's that 
brought about Murray's recall. Two years passed away, till 
in Carleton's first autumn a discharged soldier of the 28th 
regiment named Macgovoc came forward and testified that 
M. Saint Luc de la Corne, a prominent seignior and officer, 



44 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

Town-Major Disney of the 44th, Captain Campbell of the 
27th, Lieutenant Evans of the 28th, and a Mr. Howard, had 
all assisted at the assault upon Walker. The Provost 
Marshal thereupon arrested them all in their beds, cast 
them temporarily into a common gaol, and then dispatched 
them to Quebec. The Chief-Justice and Attorney-General 
Hey and Maseres, both able men, were, like Carleton, new 
arrivals. All had previously heard of the affair in England, 
where, from ignorance of the situation, the assault had 
aroused unqualified indignation. The prisoners were refused 
bail by the Chief-Justice, though petitioned to the contrary 
by all the Council, the chief residents and officers in the 
city. They were then returned to Montreal, and only 
escaped the gaol again by the consent of the Sheriff to sub- 
stitute for it a private house. Walker, much gratified at the 
situation of his real or supposed assailants, tried to postpone 
the trial. But as delay would involve, so the Chief-Justice 
declared, their admission to bail, Walker, affirming that his 
life would not then be safe, gave up the point. 

At the trial the Grand Jury threw out all the bills except 
that against Disney, upon which account Walker made a 
violent scene in court, abusing the jury in impassioned and 
unrestrained language. Disney was tried in the following 
March, and the case created intense excitement. The jury 
contained eight Canadian seigniors, and it may be worth 
noting that Walker, through the Attorney-General, objected 
to three of them as being Chevaliers of the Order of St. Louis, 
and not having therefore taken the oath of allegiance, a 
difficulty they surmounted by immediately taking it. Maseres, 
the new Attorney-General, prosecuted for the Crown. Of 
recent Huguenot descent, his bitterness against Catholics, 
then as always, biassed his otherwise sound judgment and 
good sense. Disney was directly charged with burglary 
and felony, forcing Walker's house with intent to murder, 
and for cutting off his right ear. The witness Macgovoc 
swore to having been present, and recognised the Town- 
Major. Mrs. Walker also professed to identify him. Mac- 



CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 45 

govoc, on the other hand, was accused of bearing false witness 
for the sake of the large reward. He contradicted himself, 
and his evidence disagreed with that of Mrs. Walker. He 
was a man of bad character, and indeed was soon afterwards 
arrested for rape. Disney was proved by several witnesses 
to have been dancing at the time of the outrage at a private 
house, and they swore he could not possibly have been 
absent five minutes without their knowledge. The jury 
returned a verdict of not guilty, and the mystery was never 
cleared up, while Walker continued to stir up faction in 
Montreal till the American invasion of Canada, where as we 
shall see, he figured as the leader of the local rebels, though 
not as a combatant. 

Carleton soon formed general opinions on the situation in 
which time and experience made no sensible difference. An 
abler man and of a cooler head than Murray, it says much 
for the latter that his successor in the main held much the 
same views. His indignation at the pretensions of four 
hundred Protestants to rule eighty thousand Catholics was 
every whit as strong, and his opinion of the general body of 
the former was almost as pronounced. Their constant 
petitions for an Assembly elected solely from their own 
community, he regarded as preposterous. The Canada of 
the future seemed to him, the French Canada that he now 
administered, slowly growing between the mouth of the 
Saguenay and the Island of Montreal. It was a vast enough 
district for the sober prophetic eye of that day to deal with, 
in view of a trifling population, who had, in a century and a 
half, cut away but a narrow fringe of its boundless woodlands. 
Within these bounds it seemed to Carleton that no British 
or Protestant settlers, with choice of domicile in the more 
fertile and more habitable spaces, as they then appeared 
to the southward, would dream of intruding themselves, to 
face not merely the rigour of a fierce winter but a social 
atmosphere alien in speech, habit, and creed. There was 
no little fascination, too, to an Englishman of enlightened 
views and cultivated mind, in this little isolated nation of 



46 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

seventeenth-century Frenchmen, a brave, simple, happy and 
unexacting people, that the fortune of war had thrown 
on the care and generosity of Great Britain. With every 
respect for the vigorous, liberty-loving people of the Anglo- 
American colonies, they had by this time begun to get no 
little on the nerves of the English governing class who had 
come in contact with them, and the French Canadians must 
have afforded a contrast that could hardly have failed to 
appeal, in many respects, to a man like Carleton and excite 
his sympathy, above all when practical politics seemed so 
fully to justify it. The future with all its racial troubles 
and complications was hidden at the moment from the most 
prescient eye. That the new subjects, while still politically 
raw, would be agitated by an immediate revolt of their 
southern neighbours and the country overrun by their armed 
forces, was outside the bounds of practical forecast. And 
yet much more than this — a crisis which, after all, if over- 
come might leave no trace — who could have guessed that 
thirty thousand Anglo-American refugees expelled as the 
result of a successful revolution would drop suddenly into 
this unknown, despised Canadian soil as agricultural settlers, 
upset every calculation, and with their inevitable growth 
form, in Lord Durham's memorable words half a century 
later, ' two nations warring within a single state ' ? There is a 
letter, though not a fully authenticated one, from Montcalm, 
written when the end of French dominion was in sight to 
his friends at home, to the effect that this little offshoot of 
their race might become to England, if it treated them well, 
loyal and faithful subjects, a very pillar and support some 
day against their own kith and kin. This was not at the 
moment, to be sure, an appreciable factor in Carleton's politi- 
cal calculations. However much he might have wished to 
protect the French Canadians from American political in- 
fluences, the idea of war with the colonies when it actually 
came was so repugnant to him, that in 1766 he would pro- 
bably have brushed any such forebodings from his mind. 
He was one of the many British soldiers who abhorred the 



CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 47 

very idea as unnatural, and did his utmost to soften the 
horrors of war when it came to his opponents, even when 
dealing them the one great and permanent rebuff they were 
to receive at the hands of a British general. The British 
trading community did not under the circumstances seem 
likely to develop into a factor of numerical consequence. 
The trade of Canada was unimportant. Her great export, 
beaver skins, reached but a trifling figure when compared 
with the products shipped from other colonies, and the 
Canadian fur trade, what with the Hudson Bay Company 
on the north and the restless traders from the English 
colonies at the south, was hardly an expanding one. Timber 
at that day was somewhat of a drug, and every seaboard 
province in North America was covered thick with it out- 
side the area of its farms and plantations, the more accessible 
Nova Scotia among them. Canada tanned some indifferent 
leather, and the ancient forges at Three Rivers turned out a 
little iron, from which the plainer edge-tools used in the 
colony were made. The peasants span their own wool and 
the cultivation of flax was encouraged by all the British 
Governors, though most of it was woven by the habitants 
into linen for their own use. All other manufactured goods 
were imported, and the perennial complaint of the merchants 
was the insufficiency of money and exports to pay for 
them. The revenue was mainly from customs and excise, 
the British Government making up the deficiency for 
current expenses, which, though a relatively large one, 
scarcely exceeded the annual pension paid to many an 
English politician for voting against his conscience and to 
many a butterfly as the reward of his mother's shame. The 
virtual absence of manufactures was certainly no blemish to 
Canada in the eyes of its official well-wishers. A colony 
with industrial ambitions was the reverse of an ideal one to 
a statesman of that day. Carleton probably had no par- 
ticular visions of Canada as a great commercial asset to 
Britain. He wanted a loyal and contented people pro- 
gressing steadily in the rural arts and rising to a modest 



48 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

export trade in grain which they already aspired to in 
addition to furs and timber ; a people of martial traditions 
whose descendants in return for equable treatment would 
rally to the British flag from whatever quarter it was 
threatened. It was a reasonable dream, and was partially, 
in spite of unlooked-for earthquakes, fulfilled. In the 
absence of these and with a succession of Carletons it was 
almost a certainty. But it is perhaps idle to dwell on what 
might have been, when a convulsion which beyond doubt 
was all for the best so early in the experiment tore up every 
track upon which the future life of North America was 
expected to run. 

In Carleton's time there was not a British farmer in 
Canada save a stray ex-soldier here and there, Irish or 
Scotch, who had married a habitant, and whose children 
became French. There was indeed one such entire settle- 
ment, which, in evidence of its origin, remains to-day 
perhaps the most interesting ethnological survival in Canada. 
Immediately after the conquest the seigniory of Malbaie 
had lapsed to the Crown, almost the only instance of the 
kind occurring after the commencement of British rule. 
Now Malbaie, somewhat famous to-day as the summer 
resort of Murray Bay, lies eighty miles down the lofty and 
often rugged north shore of the St. Lawrence, through the 
gaps in which you may see farms and villages lying amid 
or on the breast of high ridges, that roll back to the Lau- 
rentian mountains. A very different class of country this 
from the Isle of Orleans, or the smooth banks of the Upper 
St. Lawrence, or again from its comparatively low-lying 
opposite shore, here some fifteen or twenty miles distant. 
It was all occupied, however, this picturesque upland — 
much of it Church property — if sparsely enough, settled and 
divided into parishes and seigniories long before Murray's 
time. The seigniories lying about the mouth of the im- 
petuous river which bears his name were the last of all and 
the limit of civilisation upon that bold, romantic shore. 
And indeed there is not much beyond it even now. 



CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 49 

Murray had divided the seigniory in half by the river which 
waters it, granting each side respectively to Messrs. Nairne 
and Fraser, two Highland officers either tired of war or enam- 
oured of the patriarchal life of a resident seignior. With 
them went several of the discharged men of their regiments 
on to the then almost unoccupied forest tracts, and settled as 
censitaires under their old chiefs. They soon found wives in 
the more populous seigniory of Baie St. Paul, to which parish 
and church a contemporary list shows that Malbaie was 
attached, for some of the Scotsmen, if not all, were Catholics. 
Their children, or grandchildren at the latest, became as 
French Canadian in every way as any descendant of a seven- 
teenth-century Perche husbandman or Dieppe artisan among 
them. To-day the prevailing names in the large villages 
scattered on either side of the river mouth or in the picturesque 
little verandahed homesteads that spread up and above its 
course towards the Laurentian mountain wilderness are 
Warrens, Blackwoods, M'Nicholls, M'Leans, and others of 
like unmistakable significance. But no other trace of their 
origin pertains to them, nor anything of their language, no- 
thing but a vague tradition among the more enlightened of 
their ancestors of 'Les Ecossais' The seigniorial mansions of 
Nairne and Fraser, who had assisted both to attack and de- 
fend Quebec, and had unexpectedly to grasp their claymores 
once more in yet another defence, though enlarged or rebuilt, 
still face one another across the mouth of the Murray. 
It may be noted incidentally, too, that when the writer saw 
them they were still in possession of direct descendants or 
representatives of the two Highland seigniors, who were still 
locally known by the old appellation. Even yet, too, there 
were a few old farmers whose Norman-Scottish blood had 
revolted in 1854, when seigniorial tenure was abolished, or 
later, at parting all at once with the commutation fee of 
twenty-five dollars, or thereabouts, for the freehold of their 
entire farms, worth about that per acre, and remained as 
censitaires paying a dollar or two a year to the seignior, 
who still, of course, owns large tracts of interior forest lands. 

D 



50 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

Whether Fraser and Nairne paid foy et homage to Murray, 
as representative of the King, no record tells us. But the 
first Frenchman, Noel of Tilly and Bonsecours, to succeed 
to his father's seigniory after the conquest, we are told, did 
so ; knocking duly at the door of Government House, and 
on Murray's appearance, repeating the acknowledgment of 
faith and homage ' without sword or spurs, bareheaded and 
with one knee on the ground.' 

One of Carleton's first acts was characteristic of the man. 
He remitted all the fees that were customary on various 
transactions to the Governor, and gave as his reason that he 
considered the exaction of fees as beneath the dignity of his 
office. The Jesuits who, it will be remembered, had been 
turned out of France, took the opportunity of a change at 
the Chateau St. Louis to make further petition for the restor- 
ation of their property, and yet more, that they should be 
assisted and permitted to resume the education of youth. 
None of these propositions could be entertained for a 
moment in a British possession. Jesuit teaching was not 
likely to lessen such difficulties as Canadian Governors had 
before them. 

There was no doubt, however, that Carleton found a good 
deal of unrest among the ' new subjects.' They had been to 
some extent disturbed by the truculency of the British 
merchants and their undisguised aims at political monopoly. 
But the real crux of the whole trouble was the chaotic fashion 
in which the law was being administered, and the delays and 
abuses thereby encouraged. It was less the fault of indi- 
viduals than the difficult situation they found themselves in. 
So momentous a question as settling the laws of a country 
presumably for all time could not be done in a hurry. The 
opinion of even the able and the impartial differed, while 
the prejudices of the untutored and bigoted on both sides, 
as was natural, found unrestrained expression. The Home 
Government, with whom lay the decision, had to be con- 
sulted, and themselves to take counsel of jurists. Trans- 
atlantic correspondence occupied more weeks then than it 



CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 51 

now does days, while in the winter it took much longer to 
convey a letter from Quebec to an open port than it does 
now to carry one across the ocean. English criminal law, 
as we have seen, was universally and, save for a little demur 
from the noblesse, gladly accepted. But in the civil law all 
was confusion. Canadian advocates had been admitted to 
plead in French and knew nothing of English law, while the 
English judges, equally ignorant of the French code, and 
indeed with definite instructions not to follow it, gave their 
decisions accordingly. It was obviously impossible even to 
the most zealous upholder of English law that the whole 
French system of land tenure could be ruthlessly upset, 
without at least some preliminary measures. But the theory 
that English law had been proclaimed led to a good many 
practices that were not without humour. For example, 
while a seignior would not hear of abandoning his privileges, 
or of submitting his estate to English laws of succession and 
dower, he often took the opportunity of letting land to cen- 
sitaires on higher terms than his own code permitted. Or 
again, when a seigniory changed hands by purchase, the 
quinte, or fifth of the price due to the Crown as feudal 
superior, was refused on the same plea. Tenants too, who 
by the French law were not permitted to erect a house unless 
they held sixty arpents (fifty acres), began to build them 
freely, creating thereby, according to some contemporary 
evidence, much misery and thriftlessness. But the greatest 
terror of all was the English custom of imprisonment for 
debt, and, yet more, the ruthless practice of the magistrates 
and bailiffs. For in the French regime the courts had been 
conveniently distributed, while civil law had been cheap, 
speedy, and not oppressive to the person. By the ordinance 
of 1764 a number of magistrates had been appointed, from 
the small body of Murray's ' licentious fanatics,' of course, 
and had assumed powers that Chief-Justice Hey, in an able 
report on the subject, declares to be far beyond those in- 
trusted to English justices, men of means, position and 
education, identified, for the most part, both in sympathy 



52 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

and interest, with the people in their jurisdiction. Worse 
still, the accruing fees were an object of avarice to the men 
who in Canada held the King's commission of the peace. 
Carleton reports to his Government that the better and 
more prosperous sort among the eligible, that is to say, the 
English community, had neither time nor inclination for 
such work, but that when a publican or a butcher went 
bankrupt his next procedure was a request to be made a 
magistrate and scrape a living out of its ill-gotten fees. 
The bailiffs were French Canadians of small repute, or dis- 
charged British soldiers, who did all in their power to 
encourage litigation among the ignorant peasantry in the 
recovery of small debts. For trifling sums men's stock and 
farms were sold up at forced sales in a country where 
money was scarce, and bidders under such conditions prac- 
tically non-extant. If that did not satisfy the debt plus a 
legal fee often of six times the amount, the hapless habitant 
was cast into prison, a hopeless and ruined man. Nothing 
like this, at any rate, had ever occurred under French rule, 
and if the noblesse objected to a mere interference with 
their quasi-feudal tenure, how infinitely more must the 
habitant have been intimidated by such strange scenes of 
horror. But this after all was the abuse, not the spirit of 
English law, though the British merchants held out stoutly 
for imprisonment for debt as simplifying the process of 
collection and discouraging fraud. Among the universal 
testimony to this state of things a pathetic MS. letter 
to Carleton from an old gentleman and ex-captain of militia 
at Yamaska is among the State papers ; not a personal 
sufferer, but a distressed spectator of what is going on 
around him : ' Every day may be seen suit upon suit for 
nothing ; for twenty or thirty sous suits are entered which 
usually mount up to forty, fifty, or sixty livres, owing to the 
multitude of expenses heaped on these poor people by the 
bailiffs appointed by the authority of the Justices of the 
Peace. These bailiffs are instigators of unjust suits; they 
entice the poor people, who know nothing of the matter, 



CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 53 

to get writs against each other, which the bailiffs carry in 
blank, and require only the addition of the names of the 
plaintiff and defendant and date of appearance. I send one 
as a curiosity to your Excellency to judge of it. It often 
happens that a single person has several citations to answer 
at different Courts on the same day, and as it is impossible 
he can do so he is at once condemned by default, whereupon 
the bailiffs seize and carry off everything these poor people 
may be possessed of, the whole being disposed of at a half 
or a fourth of the real value. Should there be no one in the 
house and the doors locked they break them open to get in. 
If the goods siezed and carried off are not sufficient to 
discharge the multitude of costs laid on for the travelling 
charges of the bailiffs and otherwise, a warrant of imprison- 
ment is obtained, and thus, after having been robbed of all 
they have and possess in the world, their furniture as well as 
their cattle, their persons are finally laid hold of as a guar- 
antee that the tyranny may be complete. I would call your 
Excellency's attention to this so that you may become 
aware of the troubles of this poor afflicted people, who are 
really most tractable, and whom I have guided for the 
space of twenty-five years as Captain, and very often as 
Judge.' 

This was written in 1769, and it seems difficult to under- 
stand how under a continuously sympathetic government 
such abuses can have crept in. The size of the country, the 
lack of communications, the ignorance of the earlier law 
officers, the irritating self-assertion of the Anglo-American 
residents, were all no doubt contributing factors. But the 
new law officers had now become well aware of it, and there 
was a general consensus of opinion that the well-meaning 
ordinance of 1763, by its very vagueness, had made all these 
troubles possible. It was felt, both in Canada and by the 
British Government, that a proper settlement and Act of 
Parliament clearly defining the conditions of the future 
administration of the country was imperative, and the wits 
of all persons responsible in the matter were set busily 



54 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

working towards those conclusions which resulted in the 
repeal of the ordinances and the passing of the Quebec Act 
of 1774. A Secretaryship of State for the Colonies was, 
moreover, instituted in 1769, under the increasing pressure 
of business from North America and the West Indies, which 
Lord Hillsborough was the first to undertake, though Lord 
Shelburne continued his interest in the proposed Canadian 
legislation. I do not propose to weary the reader with all 
the various alternatives for a legal code suggested by those 
competent and incompetent to do so. Some were for 
persevering with the Fuglish civil law in its unmodified 
form, others for retaining it, but modified by French law 
where such seemed advisable. This plausible compromise, 
however, carried the danger of prolonging the present chaos 
in which each man pursued the law that mostly favoured 
his case. An entirely new code, a blend of both, the 
experts declared would involve such a vast amount of 
erudition on the part of the framers, as well as so much 
delay in preparation, as to be out of the question. Others 
again favoured the retention of the entire French civil code, 
subject to the slight amendments that common-sense and 
necessity might require. Among these was Carleton him- 
self. He urged on the Home Government the appoint- 
ment of seigniors as councillors. He also protested against 
their exclusion from military service, and affirmed that their 
natural but secret attachment to France was being stimu- 
lated by this continuous neglect. Most of the gentlemen 
of the colony had asked for military employment, in view 
of trouble with the colonies which even Carleton was now 
beginning to anticipate. There was the uncertainty again 
how France would act, and it was vital that the interests of 
the noblesse should be secured, for ' nothing had yet been 
done to gain one man.' The ruinous state of the defences 
of Quebec, too, gave much concern, and Carleton writes 
urgent letters to the Government on the subject accom- 
panied by plans of his own. He quotes incidentally the 
opinion of leading Canadians that the city could have 



CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 55 

been taken in May 1759 if Durell had pushed quickly 
up to it, that the surrender after the Plains of Abraham was 
due to the weak fortifications, and Murray could not have 
held it in the following winter if Levis had possessed 
artillery and sufficient ammunition. Ticonderoga and St. 
John on Lake Champlain, guarding the main and only 
feasible route to Canada from the colonies, were dilapidated, 
and Carleton more than once urges the Government to put 
them in a proper state of defence and, as we shall soon see, 
with very good reason. He strongly recommended too a 
Canadian regiment, for the seigniors missed the small posts 
and occasional subsidies that had come " from the Crown in 
the old regime, and some of them were in a distressed con- 
dition. Upon the whole the tranquillity and contentment 
that was so marked among the 'new subjects' during the 
years following the conquest had been considerably ruffled. 
The Church alone seems to have had no complaints of 
importance. Bishop Briand for the present on his own 
initiative, and not from any desire to suppress pomp on the 
part of the Government, lived simply and almost entirely at 
the seminary, taking his meals at the common table. Peti- 
tions from time to time were presented by the French asking 
that religious disabilities should be abolished in the matter 
of employment, and fervently assuring the King of their 
loyalty. The British community, who may have increased 
by a hundred or two, still importuned for an elective assembly 
from their own members, sometimes footing their petitions 
with the names of a few obscure Frenchmen, who, according 
to counter-petitions of their compatriots, only affixed their 
signatures because they owed the merchants money. 

Maurice Morgan had in 1767 been sent out by the British 
Government to draw up and bring back a full report of the 
working of the laws, both new and old, in Canada. This 
report had now been for some time before them, and sub- 
mitted to the Crown advisers. Morgan was in after years 
secretary to Carleton, and to him we owe some forty volumes 
of official MS. correspondence of his chief's now on the 



56 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

shelves of the Royal Institution. The knowledge that a 
definite settlement of the Constitution was impending kept 
the country outwardly quiet though in considerable suspense, 
while every interest very naturally did its utmost to reach 
the ear of the Home Government. The atrocious outrages 
of the magistrates and their bailiffs were put a stop to by 
a fresh ordinance in 1770, in regard to which it will be 
enough to say that it removed all smaller suits to the Court 
of Common Pleas, took away the power of selling up debtors 
by forced auction for small claims, assured them reason- 
able time for payment, and protected certain agricultural 
necessities from seizure and land in any case against debts 
under £12. This was met by an outburst of indignation 
from the British traders, the magistrates, and their attendant 
leeches who lived on the ruin of the poor. A petition to 
this effect was presented to Carleton, who had recently, by 
his own authority, released a whole company of habitants 
from gaol whose debts did not average £2 apiece. The 
petitioners got scant sympathy from that somewhat formid- 
able, cool-headed but warm-hearted dignitary, who ' saw no 
reason to repeal the ordinance or to modify a single clause.' 
1 These people [magistrates] were cantonned/ he says, ' upon 
the country, and many of them rid the people with despotic 
sway, imposed fines which they turned to their own profit, 
and in a measure looked upon themselves as legislators of 
the Province.' 

In this same year Carleton went to England, nominally 
on private affairs for a brief period, but the new charter of 
Canada was in fact under discussion. His presence and 
assistance were thought desirable, and he remained till the 
passing of the Act nearly four years later. A little before 
this Carleton had compiled and has left among his papers 
a useful list of the Canadian noblesse resident in Canada 
as well as of those serving as French officers. Of the 
former there are one hundred and twenty-six adult males, 
representing a proportionate number of women and children. 
Of the latter seventy-nine. The Canadian Judge, Baby, a 



CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 57 

contemporary, gives four hundred families as remaining in 
Canada and constituting a more or less educated and 
enlightened class from whom legislators or officials could 
be drawn. According to M. Benjamin Suite of Ottawa, 
whose labours in the personal and genealogical department 
of early Canadian history are most illuminating, Baby divides 
them thus: a hundred and thirty seigniors, a hundred gentle- 
men and bourgeois, a hundred and twenty-five financiers of 
various sorts, twenty-five judges and lawyers, and about the 
same number of notaries and doctors respectively. Maseres 
had also returned to England after doing a good deal of 
useful and honest work. But his prejudices against the 
French, mainly on account of their faith, were so invincible 
that, while he could suggest useful schemes as alternatives, 
he was himself for the continued ascendency of the Pro- 
testant faction even to a House of Assembly of their 
number, though he had no hope of it. He became 
ultimately Cursitor Baron of the Exchequer. 

Hector Cramahe remained at Quebec as Lieutenant- 
Governor. He was a Swiss captain in the British service, 
who, though not hitherto mentioned, had been useful as a 
public servant, and was to prove still more so at a much 
more critical time. 

Nothing of moment took place in Canada during the four 
years of Carleton's absence. Cramahe had to receive and 
forward a great many petitions of a diametrically opposite 
tenour from French and English respectively in view of the 
forthcoming Act. Of another kind, however, and showing 
what dislocation in educational matters had been occasioned 
by the war andchange of government, were frequent requests 
by the French that the college at Quebec should be re- 
suscitated for the education of youth regardless of creed 
or nationality. In answer to some statements in France 
that the Canadian habitants were ' slaves,' the seigniors 
declared that on the contrary they had acquired such 
freedom of habit that neither they nor the middling sort 
treat their superiors with the same respect as of old. There 



58 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

are an abnormal number of fires too, thought to be the 
work of incendiaries, one of them destroying the recently 
erected barracks of the troops at Montreal, and again raising 
the irritating question of quarters. The Canadian officers 
in the French army very naturally keep up a correspon- 
dence with their parents and relatives in Canada, which as 
inevitably perhaps, having regard to the restless character 
of that military nation in those days, gives the good Cramahe 
occasional qualms of anxiety. Some immigrants from 
France, too, come in by permission, and the Governor keeps 
a sharp eye on them also. There are more than two thousand 
semi-domesticated Indians in Canada, at Lorette near 
Quebec, on the Island of Montreal, and at other places, 
whose wants and complaints occur in the papers of that 
as of most periods. The western Indians in the meantime 
had temporarily ceased from troubling, though letters to 
Cramahe from that able ruler of red men, Sir William 
Johnson, at Johnson Hall on the Mohawk, echoes the chronic 
complaint of French intrigue and the illegal, provocative 
doings of the western traders both French and English. 
But the period was little more than a long lull of expectancy; 
the two parties, the large and inarticulate one, the minute 
and vociferous one, remaining as it were on tiptoe in a 
state of nervous anxiety. I must ask the reader, how- 
ever, to leave Canada for the moment and follow Carleton 
across the Atlantic, and in as brief fashion as possible 
see the Quebec Act through the British Parliament. 

The bill known as the Quebec Act was introduced by 
way of the House of Lords on May 17, 1774, and was 
handled so expeditiously that by May 26th it had reached 
its second reading in the House of Commons, which was the 
occasion selected for a full discussion and for such fight as 
the opposition were able to make against it. It would seem 
to have been the final measure for that session, and to mark 
a halcyon age when society expected to get away into the 
country before their hay was cut. For only about thirty 
peers and a little over a fourth of the House of Commons 



CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 59 

remained in town to discuss or vote upon the bill, which after 
being the subject of quite a brisk debate during several days, 
passed the third reading by fifty-six to twenty, and on the 
1 8th of June was ratified by the House of Lords. Though 
neither Parliament nor people took as a whole any interest in it 
— which is hardly surprising, seeing the apathy still displayed 
toward the grave troubles brewing in the wider field of the 
English American colonies — some few individuals had taken a 
good deal all through the preceding year. Carleton, Maseres 
(now Cursitor Baron), De Lotbiniere, a French Canadian 
seignior, Chief-Justice Hey,and Marryott, Advocate-General, 
had written and talked much concerning it. These and 
others were severally examined before the Committee of the 
House. When even Maseres, whose deep-rooted prejudices 
against the Catholic faith would have led him personally 
even to violate justice and risk a Protestant House of 
Assembly, admitted such a thing under the circumstances 
to be impossible, it will be enough to say that no re- 
sponsible counsellor was likely to hold any other opinion. 
The question of law was much more complicated. Every 
one knew what the upper and articulate classes of Canadians 
of either race wanted, but the habitants offered a field for 
divergent statements that were quite incapable of proof. 
There was no evidence that they were pining to have their 
civil cases tried by juries, while there is some that they 
object to sitting on them without being paid. The English 
laws of debtor and creditor, as recently practised upon them, 
resulted, as we have seen, in shameless outrages. In the 
seigniorial system, however,there were obviously weak points, 
which the attention of the habitant could be, and indeed 
had been, drawn to by the emissaries of freedom who from 
Montreal and even New England had already been busy ; 
his quit-rent, his fines on sale of land, the corvee which, 
though now carrying wages, was not popular, and other 
small and sometimes wholesome restrictions. In Church 
matters there had never, so far as he was concerned, been 
any alteration, and he neither looked nor wished for any. 



60 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

The bill which finally received the King's signature was 
on the whole as equitable a one as could have been drafted, 
but nevertheless it caused much indignation in certain 
quarters. Had it been such, however, as to meet with their 
approval, it would have raised a rebellion in Canada on the 
first opportunity, an opportunity much nearer than most 
people thought. And the British Government was con- 
cerned with Canada, not with orators in New England or 
sectarian fanatics in Surrey or Yorkshire. But there were 
opponents to it in Parliament who were neither the one nor 
the other, but merely playing the party game with the best 
weapons they had to hand. It was recognised that an 
elective assembly drawn from a few hundred Protestant 
townsmen of indifferent status for the coercing of 80,000 
Catholics would have been an instrument compared to which 
the much-abused Protestant Parliament in Dublin repre- 
senting most of the land, wealth, education, and a fourth 
of the nation, would have been almost democratic. A 
mixed assembly in such proportions would have left the 
British equally helpless. Moreover, as the admission of 
Catholics to Parliament was not as yet within the range of 
practical politics in England or Ireland, such a measure 
even in Canada would have met with great opposition. 
Lastly, the French were either perfectly indifferent or 
absolutely hostile to anything of the kind. So the bill 
provided for a legislative council only of seventeen to 
twenty-three members nominated by the Crown. In short, 
the government remained much as it was before, that, 
namely of a Crown colony. 

The criminal law of England and the civil law of France, 
subject to any necessary or future alteration, were adopted 
in their entirety. As this included the perpetuating of the 
seigniorial system, it was provided that the laws should not 
apply to any land already granted in free and common 
soccage, or to be granted in future by the Crown. This 
virtually meant that the old system would be limited to the 
area then under seigniorial tenure, and that any new and 



CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 61 

unsettled districts would be treated as freehold, which was 
wholly satisfactory. 

Religion was dealt with on the lines of the former 
guarantees. Indeed the Catholic Church was apparently 
strengthened by the legalising of the dime^ actually the 
twenty-seventh part, in the rural districts. This was a point 
eagerly seized upon by the enemies of the bill both in Eng- 
land and in the American colonies, as since the conquest 
the legal obligation of church dues had been in abeyance. 
That with a devout peasantry in willing subjection to an 
Ultramontane Church, any shirking of these ancient dues 
had been manifested or was likely to be, was not even sug- 
gested. But to a remote Protestant who did not know the 
Canadian Church, the cry of tyranny and reaction was a 
plausible one. This tithe was, of course, only due from 
Catholics. An oath of allegiance, too, which the latter could 
take without doing violence to their faith, was embodied in 
the Act. Lastly, the boundaries of the province were laid 
down and so determined as to follow the Ohio from the 
western boundary of Pennsylvania to the Mississippi — to 
include, in short, the whole territory of New France north- 
ward to that of the Hudson's Bay and westward indefi- 
nitely. Here was the weakest spot in the Act. The 
Government, who reserved powers to make any fresh 
ordinances it chose, and had in truth no idea of shackling 
this remote wilderness with a reactionary system, should 
have determined the western boundary of the province of 
Quebec, leaving the unpeopled wilderness beyond with its 
scattered forts to another administration under the Crown. 
Perhaps there was a desire to control the old Canadian 
sphere of trade from headquarters, or possibly, in view of 
colonial troubles, it was thought prudent to include as much 
as possible in the government of Quebec. But the effect in 
America was instantaneous, and the outcry loud. ' What,' 
cried the Virginian or Pennsylvanian, ' is our own western 
progress to be brought up short by a barrier behind which 
feudalism, Popery, an absolute government, and an alien 



62 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

law code are permanently entrenched ? ' There was a good 
deal in this ; though so lurid a picture of the future was 
not practically possible, the cry was a justifiable and telling 
one. Among the list of grievances that were being piled up 
against the mother country by the colonies the concession 
to the French Canadians by Act of Parliament of their 
religion and their laws ranked high. The debate in com- 
mittee on the bill is instructive and sometimes entertaining. 
One or two members desired a ' government for Canada, not 
a despotism! It seems curious for an eighteenth-century 
Englishmen to describe the government of a little com- 
munity of 80,000 souls by a Governor and Legislative Council 
in such sounding terms. No alternative, it may be remarked, 
was offered by any malcontent. There was none to offer, 
as either a Protestant or a mixed assembly would at that 
time have been absurd, but ' despotism ' was a popular phrase 
at the moment, and tickled the palate of speakers who 
knew little more of Canada and the perplexities of the 
moment than they did of Mexico — a mental condition not 
unfamiliar even in these days of their remote successors. 
1 It was preposterous/ said Colonel Barre, ' to suppose that 
the Canadians would fail to recognise the superiority of 
good and just laws/ a pious opinion so typically British as 
to be worth transcribing. 

Fox disliked the bill, partly because it conferred the 
tithes (of devoted Catholics) on Romish priests, and partly 
because it originated in the House of Lords. The repre- 
sentatives of the London merchants trading to Canada 
appeared in protest, as they said the bill would injure their 
business. Its vulnerable spot was easily assailed, and the 
picture of Roman law and Popery established on the Ohio 
and Niagara rivers was seized upon by several as a telling 
point. Carleton testified in favour of the French civil code, 
Chief-Justice Hey in favour of a blend that the technical 
difficulty of codifying, however, seemed insuperable. 
Maseres, who has left us a volume or two on the subject, 
and who longed to hold a brief for the other side, but was an 



CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 63 

amazing honest man, told the House that any interference 
with the land laws would be offensive to the French, and 
that they objected to juries, but might be won over by a 
small allowance. He regretted, and so did many, that no 
provision coulc be made for the Habeas Corpus. The old 
French lettres de cachet were an object of some anxiety, 
but it turned out that a Governor could not act upon them 
except by forms sent out by the King himself — as unlikely 
a proceeding for an English monarch as it was natural to 
the peculiar relationship of the Kings of France towards 
Canada. A mild sensation occurred during this debate. A 
Frenchman, primed by the English community, had come 
over to represent the Canadians as anxious for an elective 
assembly. Carleton, when under examination, was asked 
by Lord North if he knew anything of a Mons. le Brun. 
The Governor, as usual, did not mince matters. ' I know him 
very well. He was a blackguard at Paris, and sent as a lawyer 
to Canada. There he gained an extreme bad character in 
many respects. He was imprisoned for an assault on a 
young girl of eight or nine, and was fined ^20.' Carleton 
was proceeding with this precious delegate's biography 
when one of the Opposition protested. Carleton was then 
asked to retire, while North explained that it was necessary 
to know the standing of a man claiming to represent 
Canadian opinion. 

When the bill with certain amendments went back finally 
to a tired remnant of twenty-seven peers, Lord Chatham 
spoke against it. Lord Lyttelton answered rather unfor- 
tunately that if the colonies persevered in their resistance, 
he saw no reason why the loyal inhabitants of Canada 
should not co-operate with the rest of the Empire in sub- 
duing them, and thought it fortunate that their local situa- 
tion might enable them to be some check to ' those fierce 
fanatic spirits who, like the Roundheads of England, directed 
their zeal to the subversion of all power which they did not 
themselves possess.' It was commonly, though most un- 



64 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

truly, noised about in America that the Quebec Act had 
been framed and pushed through with a view to using the 
Canadians as a military weapon for the coercion of the 
colonies. 

Enough perhaps has transpired even in the course of 
these two chapters to show how entirely the legislation of 
1774 was brought about by the failure of the proclamation 
of 1763 to determine satisfactorily the internal affairs of the 
province, and how consistently and warmly, whether for 
good or ill, the men on both sides of the Atlantic re- 
sponsible for bringing about this settlement had sympathised 
with the situation of the French. That their allegiance 
was held to be a strong asset in case of outside trouble was 
a corollary of the other, but it was in no sense its motive. 
In the whole private and official correspondence it is only 
occasionally mentioned. Urgent local considerations are 
uppermost, while the sentiments which produced the Act 
were strong in Murray's time before any serious discord to 
the southward had arisen. 



THE INVASION OF CANADA 65 



CHAPTER IV 

THE INVASION OF CANADA 

When Carleton, almost immediately on the passing of the 
Quebec Act, returned to Canada, this time as a married 
man, he found events swiftly hurrying towards the crisis 
that, fortunately for the British Empire, he and not some 
other was confronted with. He arrived in September the 
bearer, as he honestly, and with apparently good cause, 
believed, of a charter that would bring content, happiness 
and loyalty to the King's subjects. He found everything 
outwardly peaceful and in order under the excellent 
Cramahe, who remained in association with him as Lieu- 
tenant-Governor. He was received by the French with 
acclamations and with such measure of lip respect by the 
British merchants as he could reasonably expect from men 
who held him as a leading agent in a measure they cordially 
detested. While in England he had married Lady Maria, 
younger daughter of his friend and contemporary Lord 
Howard of Effingham. He was himself approaching fifty, 
while his wife, who by this time had borne him two 
children, was not half that age. She was a young lady of 
sprightly if perhaps imperious bearing. Educated at 
Versailles, and acquainted with its brilliant court, she made 
herself peculiarly acceptable to the Canadian noblesse, 
and gave early promise of that character of grande dame 
which sat so naturally upon her in future and more peaceful 
years at the Chateau St. Louis. The coming ones were 
not for brilliant ladies, or vice-regal amenities, and the 
Governor's dainty and high-born wife was in no long time 

E 



66 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

sent home again to England, comfort and safety by her 
prudent and harassed lord. 

Outside Canada the storm-clouds were gathering fast 
and the seduction of the French Canadians was not only 
included in the programme of the revolutionary party, but 
had been for some time insidiously prosecuted. The 
famous convention of Philadelphia had met almost at the 
moment of Carleton's arrival, and one of its measures was 
a proclamation addressed to the Canadians, and by means 
of the disaffected British circulated in translation through- 
out the colony. 

This is rather a precious document. The same men 
who in almost the same breath had denounced Great 
Britain in equally formal documents for tolerating a creed 
in Canada that ' had spread hypocrisy, murder, blood and 
revolt into all parts of the world/ was the root of all evil, 
and, in short, the curse of the earth, which sentiments they 
had of course a perfect right to express, now announced 
the conviction that ' the liberality of sentiment so charac- 
teristic of their French Catholic neighbours would assuredly 
not stand in the way of a hearty amity.' 

That very concession of their laws and religion to the 
French which had aroused the indignation of the sons of 
liberty, both in England and America, was twisted in this 
infelicitous and lengthy document into measures of savage 
tyranny towards the beneficiaries. It was not the invitation 
to the Canadians to unite their efforts with those of their 
neighbours, not as yet warlike ones, and to send delegates 
to the Continental Congress appointed for May 1775, 
which was the gist of the message that makes it noteworthy. 
Such an invitation was natural and legitimate, but the 
statements and sentiments in which it was clothed were 
neither the one or the other. Among them is the in- 
credible suggestion that the King might even impose the 
Inquisition upon his unfortunate subjects. By what process 
of reasoning a Protestant monarch and government could 
be impelled to introduce the Spanish Inquisition among a 



THE INVASION OF CANADA 67 

community Catholic to a man, presents a conundrum, and 
suggests nothing but the king and the atmosphere of a 
famous child's story, now a classic in the English language, 
and therefore a legitimate source of analogy. In short the 
Canadians were told that they were neither free nor happy, 
and if they thought they were they had no business to think 
so ; it must be the fault of their deficient education. Tem- 
perament and race did not perhaps weigh much with a 
British colonial Protestant of the eighteenth century, wise 
and shrewd though in many respects he might be. The 
manifesto, intended obviously for the unlettered and the 
unsophisticated, was treated with natural contempt by the 
noblesse and the priests, who were now secured to the 
Crown, and virtually included among the various agents of 
tyranny arraigned in the text. On the inhabitants, since 
they could not read, the message would have fallen equally 
flat, but there were busybodies going back and forth now in 
the parishes explaining it to them with all the wealth of 
imagination natural to irresponsible demagogues playing 
upon an absolutely virgin political soil. Some of these 
came from south of the border, imported by Walker, whose 
missing ear was a most natural irritant to political activity, 
and who was now only awaiting his chance to promote a 
revolt should that chance come. A majority of the British 
community were in bitter antagonism to the Act, and one 
cannot be surprised. If they had been a substantial 
minority, with a great stake in the country, one would more 
than sympathise with their attitude, but then there would 
have been no Act and no call for sympathy. Including 
servants and employees not greatly interested, they had 
increased to perhaps a thousand or more, but such pre- 
cision does not really signify ; they were still an infinitesimal 
fraction of the whole. The Quebec British do not seem to 
have been so antagonistic, a fact due perhaps to CarletOn's 
personal influence. Montreal was the centre of disaffection, 
and Walker was the leader who, with his friends, now made 
a descent upon the Capital, and stirred up the party there to 



68 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

greater activity. Vaudrueil or Frontenac would have put 
such political excursionists in irons and shipped them to 
France. But their worse than prototypes, as their successors 
were called, somewhat stultified their reputation for tyranny 
by leaving them absolutely alone after the British custom, 
and the inhabitants fell easy victims to the tales of 
emissaries who knew their business thoroughly. The 
situation was a somewhat unforeseen one. The credulity of 
Jean and Pierre had never had occasion to be seriously put 
to the test. It was now found to be unfathomable, nor 
indeed, was it very difficult to thoroughly frighten these 
unsophisticated souls and arouse the greed of men in whose 
veins ran the peasant blood of Normandy and Picardy. They 
were told that the old impositions which, at the hands even 
of rulers of their own race and faith, had tried them no 
little, were to be renewed with greater stringency. The 
militia, which for home defence was partially maintained 
under its former captains, was to be sent into foreign 
service and used in England's European wars. The corvtes 
were to be re-imposed with more than their former rigour, 
and the iniquity of the seignioral dues was painted with 
all the eloquence that a New England orator of that day 
could, with a clear conscience, from his point of view paint 
them. The technical confirmation of the dime t which had 
never in itself been for a moment resented, was put in a 
fresh light, and made no little impression. They had been 
robbed, they were told, of their inalienable right to make 
their own laws by their own representatives, which was 
soaring a long way above their level of political intelligence, 
and it was quite safe to omit that the gift of political power 
was no part of their friends' scheme, the main object being 
to secure them as allies, or at least as neutrals in the coming 
struggle. The seigniors were not a difficult target to hit. 
Their position before the conquest had been accepted as a 
matter of course by their censitaires. Feudal affections and 
respect, all things considered, had not perhaps been very 
deeply seated. It is true that the seignior under the French 



THE INVASION OF CANADA 69 

regime had no political power, but his position was inevit- 
ably a more favoured and conspicuous one at the govern- 
ment centres than now, and he had administered rude 
justice throughout the province to his tenantry. Since 
then the latter had seen him excluded from a legislative 
council that embraced men in trade and put on one side for 
a pack of Protestant magistrates of obviously mean condi- 
tion. All this had lessened his social dignity in the eyes of 
a class who combined native cunning with political 
simplicity in a quite remarkable degree. The nominal 
recognition for a time, too, of English law, enabled the cen~ 
sitaire to practise it occasionally upon his seignior, when it 
profited him, in a manner that was nothing less than 
sharp since both preferred the old code. It was not difficult 
for the agitator to point to the somewhat slighted seignior 
as now reinstated in all his former arbitrary rights with 
loud forebodings of the truculent fashion in which he would 
use them. The dethronement of the priest was of course 
much harder, but he succeeded even here, as we shall see, 
to the extent not of sensibly affecting his tithe, but of 
robbing him for a brief but critical time of all his influence. 
To give a lucid picture of the habitants' mental attitude 
under the influences of 1774 and the following year which, 
moreover, varied much according to locality, is probably 
beyond the power of any historian, and would, moreover, 
be attempting a particularism out of scale in this work. 
As events progressed, and the future looked graver, domestic 
politics, mainly concentrated in the Quebec Act, ceased 
to absorb the articulate portion of the Canadian people. 
The British community began to disintegrate in face of so 
serious a step as definitely committing themselves to union 
with a people whose policy seemed drifting to an armed 
defiance of the Crown. The Walker faction, who would go 
all lengths consistent with their present safety, were unable 
to carry the majority of their party with them in their 
messages to the Continental Congress. It is impossible to 
follow the attitude of the general body of mere political 



70 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

malcontents as distinct from the minority who were for 
extreme measures. The latter were mainly New Eng- 
enders. The others, of various origin, from motives of 
prudence, self-interest or genuine loyalty ceased from 
troubling, and when it came to the point redeemed, what at 
the worst was an excess of political and sectarian arrogance, 
by rallying to the British flag. 

There is no occasion here to enter into the causes of the 
quarrel between Great Britain and her American provinces, 
nor to dwell on the grievous mistakes, not all on one side, that 
led to the final rupture. If they are not sufficiently familiar 
they have been, at any rate, sufficiently and ably dealt with. 
We are concerned here with an obscurer story that nobody 
is expected to know anything about, and have our hands 
quite full. It will be enough for the moment that Massa- 
chusetts, the focus of agitation, had been put under a 
military governor, General Gage, and that its port of Boston 
was closed, that the British Government and the British 
people for the most part maintained an apathetic and 
sceptical attitude, with an altogether exaggerated estimate 
of the strength of the loyalist party in America, and that 
Gage himself, though in command of a large force, had 
taken no precautions to secure the points of vantage around 
Boston. Lord North in the past winter had declared the 
colonies to be in a state of rebellion, and announced the 
intention of Government to suppress it at all costs. The 
challenge with its sting was sent out, but few steps taken to 
follow it up. Lastly, the second Congress, with much more 
definite views than that of 1774, was to meet in May at 
Philadelphia. In partial justification, however, of the pre- 
valent belief in England that no recourse to arms would be 
attempted, the military apathy of all the colonies south of 
New England in the recent Seven Years' War may fairly be 
urged. 

A recent effort at combination for purely military pur- 
poses against the Indian nations, encouraged by Great 
Britain and many leading colonists, Franklin among them, 



THE INVASION OF CANADA 71 

had utterly failed through their insurmountable sectional 
jealousies. Carleton's letters to Dartmouth during this 
winter and spring breathe of anxious moments present and 
perilous times to come. He had already begun to realise 
the widespread corruption of the habitants, and to fear 
greatly for any appeal to the militia, though he had but a 
handful of British regulars in the province. The noblesse 
were eager to serve, but were significantly lukewarm about 
commanding militiamen and urged Carleton to enrol a 
regiment of regulars, a measure entirely in accordance with 
his own wishes already intimated to the Home Government. 
The Quebec Act was to come into force on May 1, 1775, 
when, in normal times, Carleton would have organised his 
Legislative Council and duly called it together. But in May 
the first overt act of war, for the previous affair of Lexington 
was rather in the nature of a suppression of riot, occurred, 
and directly menaced Canada. This was the seizure of the 
forts, Ticonderoga and Crown Point, at the head of Lake 
Champlain, which were the keys of the ancient and only 
direct military route between Canada and the American 
provinces. The achievement was a simple one, but the idea, 
originated partly by that rude but vigorous Vermonter, 
Ethan Allen, and partly by Benedict Arnold, with the con- 
sent of the Massachusetts committee of safety, was a spirited 
one, and made a great sensation. Congress, though not 
responsible for it, took no steps to disavow the action. 
Carleton had before this urged Gage to secure these posts. 
As it now turned out, a captain and a handful of men lead- 
ing a careless isolated existence at Ticonderoga were sur- 
prised in their beds at night by a superior force headed by 
Allen, who, keeping his men in the background, announced 
to the guard that he had despatches for the Commandant. 
Knowing Allen merely as a neighbour, and suspecting 
nothing, the men opened the gate and the rest was simple. 
Crown Point, a few miles up the lake, occupied by half a 
dozen men, was taken with similar ease, and a large supply 
of war materials obtained from the two forts. Arnold then 



72 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

seized the only armed vessel on the lake, and sailing up to 
St. John's near the outlet of the Richelieu, captured the small 
guard stationed there, together with another armed sloop. 
The news of this audacious and somewhat precipitate action, 
which tended to force the hand of Congress, and took place 
on May ioth and following days, quickly reached Montreal, 
not forty miles distant, and created great excitement. The 
city had barely recovered from a domestic disturbance, 
foolish in origin but noisy of result. For on May 1st, the 
day on which the Quebec Act came into force, the King's 
bust revealed itself to the scandalised eyes of the citizens in 
a coat of black paint and further decorated with a necklace 
of potatoes, a cross and a placard bearing the inscription 
' Voila le Pape du Canada et le sot Anglais.' The French 
were indignant, as the inscription suggested a French 
culprit, and one of them offered a hundred pounds reward. 
Many personal quarrels and broils arose out of the incident, 
till a fortnight later news arrived which gave the city more 
serious things to think about. Colonel Templer of the 26th 
Regiment, to which the captured detachments of the lake 
forts belonged, at once despatched Major Preston with a 
hundred and forty men of that corps to St. John's, which 
they found just deserted by Allen, who in the meantime 
had sent a message to ' those friendly to the cause' at Mont- 
real requesting a supply of ammunition and provisions. 
Templer now called a general meeting, at which it was 
decided that volunteers should be immediately called for. 
Fifty young French Canadians of family enrolled themselves 
at once and were despatched to St. John's, a weak post, but 
the last check on an invading force. 

But this, after all, was not actual war. These early skir- 
mishers had fallen back to Ticonderoga, and there were yet 
a few weeks of respite left to Canada before the struggle 
began. On hearing of the capture of the forts Carleton had 
hurried up to Montreal at once, and writing from there to 
Dartmouth explains his own position and that of the 
colony in unmistakable language and with some bitterness. 



THE INVASION OF CANADA 73 

He had less than a thousand regulars available, Gage having 
recently deprived him of two regiments. He had already- 
measured the temper of the habitants with sufficient accuracy 
to dread the moment now impending when the militia would 
have to be called out, while as to the peasantry in general 
he would be only too thankful if they were nothing worse 
than neutral. The better class of French and the priests 
were sound and zealous, but had lost much of their influence. 
' So poisoned with lies ' had been the minds of the people. 
For this last, too, the British Canadians had been mainly 
responsible, acting as they had done in concert with American 
emissaries. As to the proportion of actual rebels of either 
race, neither Carleton nor any one else could judge till the test 
came. Martial law was now proclaimed and a part of the 
militia called out. Both measures were fiercely resented by 
the British Canadian Whigs under the plea that the Ameri- 
cans intended to let Canada severely alone provided she 
remained neutral, but that any show of arming herself would 
be taken by the others as an intention of offensive operations 
against the northern colonies. This was absurd, as none 
knew so well as the objectors that the Americans with their 
co-operation had cut the claws of the Canadian militia and 
rendered them virtually useless even as a defensive force, 
and quite impossible as an aggressive one. While the 
Governor was in Montreal all compromise was discarded 
and war virtually declared. The British in the city for the 
most part refused point blank to serve till Chief-Justice Hey, 
who accompanied Carleton, addressed them with such im- 
passioned reproaches that many were shamed into a better 
mood, while a few had been staunch throughout. The 
militia, however, justified the worst expectations, and with 
rare exceptions resolutely declined to muster. Accepting 
their credulity as an unavoidable if incalculable fact in the 
situation, one cannot be surprised at their disinclination. 
They had done fighting enough and to spare under the old 
regime when their national and religious animosities were 
involved. Here, however, were two sets of Englishmen and 



74 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

heretics bidding for their favour, and their old particular 
enemies the Bastonnais had bid, as they thought, highest. 
They offered them in private, if not precisely in proclama- 
tions, a future free of all obligations, and in which every- 
thing was to be had for nothing. If this kind of talk can be 
used with effect in the twentieth century, how much more so 
on the quite illiterate Canadian habitant of the eighteenth. 
They had been tolerably pleased with their English rulers, 
but they now learned that all this clemency was a mere 
deceptive prelude to an iron tyranny, as foreshadowed by 
the skilful interpreters of the Quebec Act. No doubt they 
were often a good deal bewildered, and we might fancy a vein 
of natural shrewdness caused many to reserve their opinions. 
But it is not unnatural that as a mass they decided to let 
these mad Englishmen fight ou' their own quarrel. It was 
in vain their seigniors harangued them and reminded them 
of their duty to their God, their King, and to themselves, 
and of their ancient prowess against the once hated Baston- 
nais. It was in vai * that Bishop Briand invoked their 
loyalty, and the priests from a hundred and twenty rural 
pulpits thundered against the republican heretics. They 
laughed at their seigniors, showing them plainly and telling 
them their day was over, and for one brief interval in 
Canadian history disregarded their priests. A few meagre 
companies were scraped together in the parishes, but some 
even of these melted away on the march and left their officers 
to proceed alone. It would be absurd to blame them, but it 
is well the truth should be recognised, since it is quite com- 
monly stated in histories that our policy to the French 
Canadians, as stereotyped by the Quebec Act, saved Canada, 
and the impression thereby conveyed, even when the fiction 
is not actually perpetrated, that the Canadian masses rose 
in defence of the colony. It is true in a sense that the 
Quebec Act in all probability did save Canada, but not in 
the way generally understood. The policy it represented 
attached the upper class and the clergy to the Crown. The 
former, though they could bring no appreciable following, 



THE INVASION OF CANADA 75 

fought together with a handful more as individuals and 
counted for much, since the invaders were also few. But 
what is more important still, if the noblesse and clergy had 
been alienated, their influence would have carried a peasantry, 
now for the most part merely neutral, into the ranks of the 
enemy, and the fate of Canada would have been sealed 
almost without a blow. 

Carleton returned to Quebec at the end of July, having 
done all that was for the present possible at Montreal. 
Colonel Prescott, of that famous but then sadly shrivelled 
regiment the 7th Fusiliers, was left in command with such 
hand il of combatants as could be spared, but most of the 
e *» ; , ves had gone forward to the Richelieu forts. At 
John's Preston had now with him five hundred regulars 
A the 7th and 26th Regiments and a hundred and twenty 
Canadian volunteers, mostly 'gentilhommes/ with a few 
artillerymen, while at Fort Chambly, lower down the 
Richelieu, was Major Stopford with eighty regulars. The 
British soldiers at these two forts comprised the greater part 
of the regular force now available for the defence of Canada. 
The Quebec Indians had been tampered with, but Guy 
Johnson, nephew of the late Sir William, had arrived with 
three hundred of the Six Nations from the Mohawk, to serve 
their useful part as scouts and messengers, and these were 
now set to watch the Americans at Ticonderoga. 

Carleton descended the St. Lawrence to open the first 
session of his new Council at Quebec in no sanguine temper. 
While halting at Three Rivers with De Tonnancour, a 
wealthy seignior, trader and staunch supporter of the Crown, 
he gave a sovereign to a sentry at his door with the caustic 
remark that he was the first Canadian (peasant) he had seen 
in arms. He felt deeply the desertion of a people whose 
welfare he had consistently studied even to the loss of no 
little popularity at the hands of his own race, though he was 
fully alive to the fact that he was not the victim of any 
particular malignancy but of peculiar anu untoward circum- 
stances. On his arrival he found another fraternal address 



76 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

from the Americans circulating in the parishes which opened 
with characteristic bombast, ' The parent of the universe 
hath divided this earth among the children of men.' Leaflets 
too had been thrust under the peasants' doors inscribed — 

' On-y soit qui mal y pense. 
A celui que ne suivra le bon chemin.' 

Baston. 

The people had also been threatened by their American well- 
wishers, not perhaps too judiciously, that if they stood by 
the English fifty thousand troops would sweep the country 
with fire and sword. The first meeting of the newly 
organised Council on August 17th, with so much possibility 
of its being the last, must have been a somewhat melancholy 
one. Twenty-two members, with Cramahe as Lieutenant- 
Governor, met Carleton on this depressing occasion, and 
included eight French Canadians, of whom St. Luc de la 
Corne and De Contrecoeur were perhaps the more notable. 
Among the others, Hey, as Chief-Justice, Dr. Mabane, 
Finlay, Allsopp and John Fraser were the most conspicuous. 
But the session was brief enough, for with the opening of 
September came the news that the Americans had again 
crossed the border into the Richelieu country, and all in- 
terest in domestic legislation dropped into abeyance. 

Carleton started at once for Montreal, leaving Quebec, 
practically bare of troops, in Cramahe^s charge ; but Quebec 
was for the present regarded as out of harm's way. Instruc- 
tions from home had just arrived announcing the King's 
perfect faith in the zeal of his new Canadian subjects, and 
authorising Carleton to raise six thousand of them, for half 
of whom clothes and arms were on the way. There was 
but cold comfort in all this and a little unintentional irony, 
together with some evidence that the King and his friends 
had been as slow to accept the signs from Canada as those 
from the southward. Carleton had also secret intelligence 
from Tryon, Governor of New York, that three thousand 
men were to muster at Ticonderoga to be joined later by 



THE INVASION OF CANADA 77 

four thousand more from New England, with a view to a 
general advance into Canada. He had already written to 
Gage pointing out his utter lack of troops and urging the 
despatch of two regiments. The latter in the meantime 
had been supplanted by Howe at New York, who conceded 
a battalion and transports, but Graves, the Admiral, refused 
the ships, and there the matter ended. There had been no 
definite idea of an attempt on Canada at the American 
headquarters early in the summer. It was regarded as 
exceeding the legitimate aims of the resisting colonies and 
likely to alienate outside sympathy. But it soon became 
obvious to Washington how useful a base Canada might 
become to a royal army intent on cutting off New England 
from her sister colonies, as of course it did, though the 
attempt failed. Now that neutrality, if not the native assist- 
ance of the inhabitants, had been secured, the task appeared 
easy and the gains great. The strength of the defence 
seemed ridiculously inadequate, about eight hundred regulars 
and a mere handful of British loyalists and Canadian gentry. 
Quebec, to be sure, was a fortified town, but the low walls 
of Montreal were quite dilapidated and useless. There was 
now no longer any doubt at the latter city that an army 
was gathering on Lake Champlain for an advance upon it, 
but Carleton could not know that the very day upon which 
he arrived there Benedict Arnold with eleven hundred 
picked men was starting for the mouth of the Kennebec, 
with Quebec itself as their objective point. It was enough 
for the moment that fifteen hundred were on Lake Cham- 
plain awaiting reinforcements, and that some seven hundred 
regulars and volunteers, the greater portion of Carleton's 
effective force, in a couple of indifferent forts, was all that 
stood between them and an open city and a defenceless 
country. 

Philip Schuyler had taken command of the American 
army of invasion. He was head of a Dutch family dis- 
tinguished for their social qualities, their large territorial 
possessions on the Hudson, their loyalty in the late war, 



7S THE MAKING OF CANADA 

and their hospitality to the British officers engaged in it. 
He also, later on, became father-in-law of Alexander Hamil- 
ton — all of which is perhaps a little parenthetical, as illness 
compelled his resignation, and Richard Montgomery, of 
great but somewhat fortuitous renown, succeeded to the 
command. Son of a Donegal landowner and M.P., 
and educated at Trinity, Dublin, Montgomery became at 
eighteen an ensign in the 17th Foot. He fought at Louis- 
bourg, was with Amherst in the two ensuing campaigns, 
which culminated in the conquest of Canada and later on 
as a Captain served in the West Indies. At the peace he 
sold his commission, through pique at some official slight, 
it has been said, and went to New York, near which he 
bought a small estate and married a daughter of Judge 
Livingstone, whose family was among the foremost of the 
Anglo- New York gentry. They were now the leading 
partisans of Congress in the province as opposed to the 
powerful De Lancy's, who stood for the Crown. Mont- 
gomery had sat in the first provincial convention of New 
York, and from his knowledge of soldiering, backed by the 
Livingstone influence, was appointed a brigadier. He was 
now just under forty and appears to have been a good- 
looking, attractive man, with the professional knowledge 
one would expect and the capacity for dealing with colonial 
levies one would also look for in a resident among them. 
A little more perhaps than an average soldier, and a gentle- 
man, though afflicted with an unfortunate epistolary style, 
who with an American wife and estate and a grudge against 
the British Government, found himself a quite useful general 
in a raw army and a personage of consequence. Such a 
web of emotional verbiage has been weaved about Mont- 
gomery's name, founded apparently upon slender fact and 
flavoured with such banal anecdotes, it is tolerably obvious 
that very little is really known about him. Historians, for 
instance, describe with unction how in bidding farewell to 
his tearful wife he remarked, ' You shall never have cause to 
blush for your Montgomery.' We are further told that on 



THE INVASION OF CANADA 79 

the same painful occasion the great thoughts revolving 
in his mind were obvious from his enunciating in a deep 
voice, ' Tis a strange world, my masters ; I once thought so, 
and now I know it,' and that his wife's young brother was 
so overcome by this weighty and original outburst that he 
rushed awe-stricken from the room ! This is hard on Mont- 
gomery when there is so little else to say about him. He 
died bravely doing his duty before he had the good fortune 
even to draw his sword, as forty or fifty of his more fortunate 
but less famous comrades died in the heat of battle but are 
not remembered. 

Schuyler had an unsatisfactory brush or two with 
Preston's Indians and volunteers before he retired to 
intrench his rather dissatisfied force on the Isle-au-noix, 
and then, out of health and out of spirits, into the back- 
ground for a space, after which Montgomery put a new 
face on matters. Ethan Allen with a body of Indians who 
favoured his cause was despatched into this region, which 
received the invaders with open arms and gave them both 
active arid negative resistance. Here he met Major Brown, 
prominent diplomatically and actively in all this Canadian 
business, prowling about with two or three hundred men. 
Allen proposed an attempt upon Montreal, which the other 
agreed to, but on second thoughts, being a man of judg- 
ment, if not according to Allen of his word, failed the 
Vermonter, who with characteristic foolhardiness and puffed 
out with the memory of his bloodless achievement at 
Ticonderoga proceeded to the adventure by himself with a 
hundred and fifty followers. 

It was near the close of September and Carleton with a 
hundred or so men of the 26th and a body of hardly- 
raised doubtful militia was lying at Montreal awaiting events 
at St. John's, when Ethan Allen crossed the river on the 
24th and occupied some houses at Long Point, a league 
from the city. Thither Carleton despatched thirty regulars 
and two hundred and fifty militia, who in half an hour 
captured Allen and thirty-five of his people with slight loss. 



80 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

The over-enterprising Vermonter was shipped as a prisoner 
to England, where in Dartmouth Castle he had abundant 
leisure to reflect on the vicissitudes of the brief military 
career, which in his own country has given him immortality. 
We shall meet this somewhat irrepressible and not over 
scrupulous Green Mountain man again in a future chapter 
and in another character. Carleton in the meantime would 
have given much to relieve St. John's, which was now 
regularly invested by Montgomery's greatly superior force, 
recently supplied with most of the necessities of war. 
Indeed he actually made an attempt to cross the St. 
Lawrence at Longueuil with his hundred and fifty regulars 
and some raw militia. But the further banks were lined 
with American riflemen who were now swarming in this 
country, abetted everywhere by the inhabitants, and the fire 
was too hot to face. 

Montgomery had now two thousand men, and one of the 
Livingstones residing at Sorel, as a grain merchant, had 
enrolled in his cause several hundred of the habitants, 
descendants mostly of that famous French regiment of 
Carrignan which had been in part disbanded and settled 
on the Richelieu a century before. 

Fort Chambly stood and still stands at the foot of the 
long rapids which below St. John's broke the navigation of 
the Richelieu on its way from Lake Champlain to the St. 
Lawrence, a square stone fortress with bastions and curtains, 
erected in 1710. It was now held as already stated by 
Major Stopford, son of Lord Courtown, with eighty men of 
the 7th, and was considered proof against anything but 
heavy artillery. Stopford, however, after receiving a few 
shots from nine pounders brought down from St. John's by 
the ubiquitous Brown and a small detachment, surrendered 
at discretion in thirty-six hours, on October 18th. There 
were a good many women in the fort to be sure, but it was 
also full of stores and war material, invaluable to the 
Americans. Its fall brought about that of St. John's, from 
before which winter must have driven the invaders, if 



THE INVASION OF CANADA 81 

only by cutting them off from their base of supplies. Under 
the circumstances, Stopford's conduct, leading as it did to 
the occupation of Canada, was disgraceful. There is con- 
temporary evidence that it was so regarded by the army in 
Canada, though not apparently by the home authorities, for 
he was neither censured, nor hindered in promotion. But 
Germain had just become the first minister of the Crown ; 
and in an age when that exalted post could be occupied by 
an ex-cavalry commander who had been cashiered for 
cowardice in the field, anything was possible. 

Stopford had not even the wits to throw his stores and 
guns into the river beneath the walls of the fort, which would 
probably have saved the situation. A fortnight later, after 
a short defence but with provisions almost exhausted, 
Preston had to succumb before the prospect of a prolonged 
siege and the battering of a more formidable artillery. 
Montgomery's bad turn of manner brought a brief hitch in 
the negotiations, his written conditions ending with ' regrets 
that so much valour had not been shown in a better cause.' 
This superfluous improvement of the occasion Preston, as a 
King's officer, would not brook, swearing that he and his 
men would rather die at their posts than subscribe to a 
document containing such a gratuitous insult, upon which 
it was expunged. So most of Carleton's regulars, the luck- 
less Andre of later notoriety among them, and some four- 
score picked Canadians, went off to New Jersey as prisoners. 
Montgomery with his exultant army, and the goodwill of 
the surrounding parishes that were incidentally making 
some money out of him, moved directly upon Montreal by 
the rough road which cut straight across to La Prairie, 
within sight of the defenceless city. Carleton, who could 
make bricks without straw as well as most people, could not 
save Montreal. All he could do was to spike his guns and 
attempt to save himself and the hundred and thirty men 
and officers who were left around him, praying at the same 
time that the west wind might hold. 

To the sorrow of their friends and the delight of Walker 

F 



82 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

and his party, who had been inconveniently subjected to 
martial law, Carleton sailed on November 2nd, the day 
before the Americans entered the city. A fair breeze bore 
their little flotilla safely along to Sorel, where the Americans 
in force had erected batteries to dispute their passage. 
Here at an ill moment the wind veered to the east and 
held them in a trap with capture inevitable. But the vital 
importance of Carleton himself getting through to Quebec 
was urged on all sides, and the French skipper of one of the 
boats, who had earned the sobriquet of ' La Tourtre ' or the 
wild pigeon for his rapid voyages, undertook to get the 
General past the Americans, and he proved as good as his 
word. Starting that night with muffled oars and paddling 
through the narrow passage of the lie du Pas with their 
hands, they escaped the vigilance of the foe, and traversing 
Lake St. Peter in safety arrived at Three Rivers, where 
Carleton heard that one American force was marching 
along the north shore to Quebec and another encamped 
near it. When he reached the city by means of an armed 
sloop, ' to the unspeakable joy of the garrison/ he found 
that the latter part of the rumour current at Three Rivers 
was substantially true, but how that came about requires 
some brief explanation. 

It has been already stated that on that very September 
day which witnessed Carleton's arrival at Montreal, a force 
was sailing for the mouth of the Kennebec bent on a secret 
march through the wilderness and the surprise, if possible, of 
Quebec. This of course was that somewhat famous exploit 
which brought the notorious Arnold to the front. Now the 
mouth of the Kennebec is just north of the present town 
of Portland in Maine. The river is navigable as far as 
Augusta, then Fort Western, a frontier post. Thence a 
trail of water, sometimes rapid, sometimes still, and merging 
betimes into lakes of various sizes, climbs the long mountain 
watershed forming the Canadian frontier, beyond which 
again the waters of the Chaudiere pursue their rapid down- 
ward course to the St. Lawrence just above Quebec. The 



THE INVASION OF CANADA 83 

distance by a crow's flight is some two hundred miles, that 
traversed by tortuous streams and defiles was at least a 
hundred more. But its mileage was the least of it, for the 
whole route lay through a shaggy untrodden wilderness of 
rock, flood and forest It had been once surveyed and the 
trees blazed, but there was now scarcely any trail, and it was 
only known to stray Indians and trappers, who could travel 
light or support themselves by the way with fish-hook or 
rifle. But for an armed force of over a thousand men in 
a hurry, the northern woods offered of course no shred of 
sustenance. They had not only to carry a month's pro- 
visions, and their ammunition, but the stout boats which 
were necessary to their transport over the innumerable 
obstacles which choked or parted the waterways. 

Washington approved the enterprise and nominated 
Arnold, who had already shown his mettle and talent for 
leadership, to the command. The force was a picked one, 
1 the flower of the colonial youth' as was said at the time, 
all young men and lusty. About half of the eleven hundred 
were hardy mountaineers from the Indian frontiers of 
Pennsylvania and Virginia, including men like Daniel 
Morgan and Hendrichs, the rest New England volunteers, 
gentlemen or farmers' sons. They started from Fort 
Western on September 25th, with two hundred bateaux, 
and were five weeks in the wilderness. Their adventures 
form a somewhat thrilling chapter in American annals. 
Letters, journals and evidence of every kind have been so 
industriously collected that, even allowing for some exaggera- 
tion of patriotic editing, there is no doubt but that it was a 
great performance, for they were confronted by unusual 
floods and an altogether unseasonable snowfall. They had 
to haul the bateaux, now up flooded torrents, now up shallow 
rocky channels ; to carry them on sore shoulders over portages 
bristling with primitive evergreens, and often broken by 
rocks and cliffs, or through that sodden chaos of prostrate 
trunks and oozy wreckage that distinguishes the Canadian 
woodland swamp. They slept and toiled through days of 



84 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

chill and snow and rain. Their bateaux were gradually- 
broken and washed away, their provisions spoiled, their 
boots gave out, and after a time from semi-starvation, their 
strength as well. Four hundred flinching at the idea of death 
from sheer want turned back. Seven hundred struggled on, 
reduced at last to eat boiled bits of hide and leggings, 
candle-ends or grease. Some died, a few were drowned, 
but the actual extremity of starvation only lasted a very 
few days, though they had not at the moment even the 
consolation of that foreknowledge. Arnold himself went 
forward down the head-waters of the Chaudiere on a rickety 
raft. Reaching the first Canadian settlements he found 
them friendly, another uncertain calculation, and carried 
back provisions just in the nick of time. The short 
remainder of the march produced supplies, and the men had 
the recuperative powers of youth and strength. They 
reached the St. Lawrence at Pont Levis by the 8th of 
November for the most part recovered, to find that Cramah£ 
had only a few hours before removed every boat from the 
south shore, having just heard of their approach through an 
intercepted letter that Arnold had sent by an Indian to 
Washington. 

Arnold's dash and resolution in this enterprise is beyond 
cavil, and the tenacity of his followers was no little due to 
his inspiration, while his resourceful energy at the end 
possibly saved their lives. With normal October weather 
his difficulties would have been infinitely less. His whole 
force would have come through in good condition a week or 
two earlier, and if Quebec had been unprepared he might 
conceivably have captured it. Had this been so I should 
not have felt called upon here to dwell even thus long 
upon ' Arnold's March ' by way of explanation to my 
readers, for the exploit, like that of Wolfe, would have rung 
down the ages. 

As it was, Arnold summoned a council of war, and 
suggested an immediate attempt on the city, against which 
adventure only one member voted. They found the habi- 



THE INVASION OF CANADA 85 

tants friendly, and collected sufficient canoes to cross the 
river and land at Wolfe's Cove, whence they marched over 
the Plains of Abraham and demonstrated against the walls 
of the city, being received with defiant cheers and a salute 
of cannon-shot. Arnold now lodged his men in and about the 
general hospital near the St. Charles, and sent a summons 
to Cramah<§ couched in the bombastic phraseology that was 
the mode among his contemporaries. Cramahe declined to 
receive it, and Arnold coming to the conclusion that the 
city was invulnerable to riflemen, marched his force up the 
river to Pointe-aux-Tremble, there to await Montgomery 
who had just occupied Montreal. 

1 Never,' wrote Chief- Justice Hey, who was in the thick of 
all this business, to the Lord Chancellor, ' did such a mixture 
of ignorance, fear, credulity, or perverseness take possession 
of the human mind ' (alluding to the habitants). ' Every- 
thing seems desperate, and I fear before this letter arrives 
Canada will be in full possession of the rebels.' He blames 
the seigniors in part for this disaffection of the habitants, 
though as a matter of fact the latter had small cause for 
complaint. Political liberty, as understood and preached 
by their American friends, had not as yet the faintest 
meaning for them ; their rents were microscopic ; their 
church dues to this day, after generations of political power, 
are scrupulously paid. Certain coercive customs of the old 
French regime had disappeared. They had virtually every- 
thing necessary to their situation, which was beyond all 
comparison, as every traveller admitted, far superior to that 
of the European peasant. But the more ignorant the 
subject the easier to move it by irresponsible appeal to 
simple greed, and this is what the American agents had 
mostly done. ' But for the British troops,' wrote Hey, ' this 
province would have subdued the colonies from north to 
south in the last war, and the terror of that memory has 
made them take enormous pains to win over the 
French.' 

But the seigniors, by their imprudent and overdone 



86 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

exultation at the retention of the land laws, as one can well 
imagine, gave needless provocation to their rivals the British 
merchants, and conveyed the impression, and sometimes no 
doubt a good deal more, to the peasantry that the good old 
times and all their abandoned privileges were to be renewed. 
Restraint and political sagacity were hardly to be expected 
of an eighteenth-century Canadian seignior. One can see 
it all so plainly in the correspondence of the time, and the 
whole situation is so natural in view of the curious, 
picturesque and inharmonious elements that created it. 
The high-tempered, ultra-provincial and often ignorant 
seignior cursing the impudence of the peasantry in chorus 
with a bourgeoisie allied to the former in interest, often in 
marriage, and frequently seigniors themselves. A British 
mercantile community resenting the pretensions of a pseudo- 
aristocracy not qualified from their point of view to air 
them and altogether an anachronism in a poor, undeveloped 
country ; Protestants themselves of the vigorous kind 
generally found in a Catholic country, to say nothing of 
the strong New England Puritan strain among them, and 
exciting some jealousy in the towns by their success in 
trade. A priesthood socially humble but professionally 
autocratic, detesting and dreading the American influence. 
A nondescript population in the two cities, French and 
English, the latter not large below the bourgeoisie, and 
remaining historically inarticulate. Lastly, an altogether 
preponderating peasantry, illiterate, inscrutable, twisted this 
way and that by currents of strange and new ideas, which 
play now upon their fears, now upon their robust underly- 
ing instinct for the main chance. 

When Carleton arrived soon after Arnold's disappearance 
up the river he found Cramahe' had taken every precaution 
within his power. The militia had been enrolled, the stores 
for eight months laid in. A skilled engineer, James 
Thompson, who has left us an account of his experiences, 
had the dilapidated walls patched up and erected much 
heavy palisading at vulnerable points. For no representa- 



THE INVASION OF CANADA 87 

tion of Murray or Carleton had been able to wring money 
out of the British Government for securing the key of 
Canada. One provision Cramahe, who complained that he 
was more afraid of the rebels within, even in the militia, 
than those without, had not yet made, and that was the 
somewhat critical one of severing the sheep from the goats. 
Carleton soon remedied this by issuing a stringent order 
that every man who was not prepared to take his part in 
the defence of the city must quit it within four days, and 
there was a great exodus. After this purging Carleton 
took stock of his resources in men and material. The 
second was ample enough for the scanty number of the 
first, as a hundred guns were mounted, or soon to be, on 
the walls and batteries, while there were more firearms than 
men to use them, and more ammunition than they could 
fire away. Of the militia there were some five hundred 
and odd French, and some three to four hundred seasoned 
soldiers of M'Lean's Royal Emigrants with ninety recruits 
just arrived from Newfoundland. This enterprising officer 
had raised his corps quite recently from the Highland 
settlements of disbanded soldiers and others made in 
America after the late war. He had scoured the colonies 
as far as North Carolina, but on account of the tense local 
feeling, and not from any reluctance on the part of the 
Gaelic immigrants, was ultimately reduced to the limited 
recruiting-grounds of the Murray Bay seigniories and the 
New York frontier. 

The men from the frigates Lizard and Hunter lying in 
the haven and the crews of some merchant vessels made 
up about four hundred more. French volunteers, students 
and others capable of guarding prisoners or performing 
negative but useful duties, made up the roster of that 
nationality which is extant to seven hundred and ten names. 
In all there were some eighteen hundred men armed and 
on duty, while the exodus from panic or from Carleton's 
purging process had reduced the population to about five 
thousand souls. Colonel Caldwell, a retired officer resident 



88 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

in Quebec, commanded the British, Colonel Voyer the 
French volunteers, and Captain Henderson the naval 
detachment, while M'Lean of the Royal Highland Emi- 
grants acted as second in command to Carleton. Thus 
poorly manned, though fortunate in command and the only 
spot in the colony still held by a British force, Quebec 
braced herself for the fourth and last siege in her history, 
and once again to determine who were to be tihe future 
masters of Canada. Carleton knew and the Americans 
knew that while Quebec still rose unconquered upon her 
rock above the waves of domestic anarchy and foreign 
invasion Canada was not won. 



THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 89 



CHAPTER V 

THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 

The complacent photographer has made almost every one 
familiar with the hopelessly inadequate presentation of 
Quebec that seems inseparable from his process, and its 
limitations. I would ask the reader who has nothing better 
before his mind than the low-lying flattened out ridge 
extended across the background of a wholly dispropor- 
tionate expanse of water, exhibited by steamship companies' 
emigration pamphlets and books of travel, to banish from 
his mind this triumph of the inartistic and these distortions 
of a camera. How different is the reality of this same scene 
as you draw up to it over the face of the waters, every 
one who has the good fortune to be familiar with it well 
knows. It is not my business to dwell here on the noble 
pose of the historic city as it rises with its spires and gables 
and much of the detail of an ancient town and all the 
dignity of a storied one to the high stern outlines of the 
citadel and the flanking buttresses of Cape Diamond. The 
mention of the camera, however, which so stultifies the 
distinction of Quebec, brings us to hard prose, which is 
fitting as we are concerned here with a siege, so I will 
make free with a suggestion that will help the reader 
unfamiliar with the locality to a rough-and-ready notion of 
the physical character of the famous city. Let him imagine 
a shoe pointing down the river, with the lower town, the 
quays and business quarters forming the flat toe, and the 
upper town climbing in parts where it is not abrupt rock 
and spreading wide over the higher part of the instep. 



90 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

The flat upper and hollow part of the shoe, prolonged con- 
siderably, may represent the plateau ridge at the back of 
the city loosely known as the Plains of Abraham, while 
the near side may fairly stand for the cliffs which raise them 
above the St. Lawrence. The further or inland side of 
the toe, continuing the metaphor, splays out to be roughly 
marked by the tortuous course of the St. Charles, while the 
further side of the shoe falls with less abruptness to the 
flats beside it. The confluence of this river with the 
greater one, makes an angle or partial promontory on 
which the city is set and so majestically upraised. All this 
water front, however, has been greatly altered in modern 
times by the pushing out of docks and their embankments. 
The land defences, the walls with their three gates ran and 
in great part still run across the angle from river to river, 
though now, on the St. Lawrence side, to the Citadel 
crowning the height above it. The river contracts slightly 
just opposite Quebec, the distance across to Point Levis, 
its complement on the south bank and the site of Wolfe's 
batteries, being only three-quarters of a mile. Below, it ex- 
pands again immediately, helped by the spreading shallow 
mouth of the St. Charles, in itself but an inconsiderable 
stream and for five straight miles down forms a wide and 
noble basin, terminated by the woody and fertile island of 
Orleans which parts the river for nearly twenty miles. A 
point this last at which generations of Quebeckers, looking 
down over the broad reach with its distant background of 
the Laurentian mountains, have caught their first anxious 
sight from the ramparts of a friendly or a hostile sail or 
watched for the first harbingers of news from Europe after 
the long winter silence, or cast eager eyes in the lean years 
of old for the oft-needed provision ships from France. On 
December the 5th Montgomery and Arnold, with about 
twelve hundred men, a considerable proportion tricked out 
in scarlet uniforms acquired at the capture of the St. John's 
forts, and about three hundred Canadians under Brown, 
sat down before the city. Arnold quartered his men in 



THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 91 

and about St. Roch near the St, Charles, while the general 
pitched his headquarters at Holland House on the St. Foy 
road. The latter before proceeding to those more active 
measures in which he was calculated to shine, tried some 
preliminary passes with his pen directed at Carleton and 
his garrison. The former he accused of ill-treating himself 
and of cruelty to his prisoners (Allen and company) but 
his own humanity, he protested, moved him to give his 
opponent the chance of saving himself and others from 
the destruction which hung over them. He was well ac- 
quainted with Carleton's situation, namely * a great extent 
of works, from their nature incapable of defence, manned by 
a motley crew of sailors, the greatest part our friends or 
of citizens who wish to see us within their walls, and a few 
of the worst troops who ever styled themselves soldiers.' 
He pointed out the impossibility of relief, the want of 
necessities in the event of a simple blockade, and the 
absurdity of resistance. He was himself at the head of 
troops accustomed to success, confident in the righteousness 
of their cause and so incensed at Carleton's inhumanity 
that he could with difficulty restrain them, and much more 
to this effect. He concluded by warning Carleton that if 
he destroyed stores, public or private, there would be no 
mercy shown. Carleton regarding Montgomery, an ex- 
British officer in arms against his king, as outside the pale 
of recognition, took no notice of his missive, which was 
conveyed by an old woman. Several copies of a further 
address to the inhabitants were shot over the walls affixed 
to arrows and were not calculated to edify the thousand or 
so volunteers in arms, whom he called ' a wretched garrison 
defending wretched works,' and drawing for their benefit 
a lurid picture of a city in flames ; carnage, confusion, 
plunder all caused by a General courting ruin to avoid his 
shame. 

The snow was already a foot deep when Montgomery 
planted his batteries, one of twelve pounders, on the St. Foy 
road five hundred yards from the St. John's gate, and a bomb 



92 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

battery in the suburb of St Roch. A few score shells were 
thrown into the city, but with small effect, before the heavy 
guns of the garrison put the others out of action. Arnold 
was driven by their fire from his headquarters, and Mont- 
gomery's horse was killed by a cannon ball. The rifle fire 
of the Alleghany men who occupied the cupola of the 
Intendant's palace near the St Charles did much more 
damage, picking off the men on the walls till it became 
unsafe to show a head above them. But this really did not 
advance matters, and the besiegers, exposed to all the 
rigour of winter and ineffectively clad against it, were in no 
enviable situation. Montgomery had expected an easy 
triumph after his Montreal experience, and if his friends are 
to be believed, began to suffer no little from dejection. His 
letters to his father-in-law were pitched in a considerably 
lower key than those he addressed to Carleton and the garri- 
son : * I need not tell you that till Quebec is taken Canada is 
unconquered. There are three alternatives — siege, invest- 
ment, or storm. The first is impossible from the difficulty 
of making trenches in a Canadian winter and the impossi- 
bility of living in them if we could.' The soil, he continued, 
did not admit of mining ; and lastly, his artillery was useless 
for breaching walls. Nor had he enough men to invest the 
city and prevent the garrison, familiar with the country, 
from getting in food and firewood. He was limited, too, in 
the number of Canadians he could enlist by the want of 
specie, for the paper money of Congress was already looked 
at askance by the country people. Storming might be 
feasible, for if his own force was small, so was Carleton's, who 
had moreover a long extent of works to defend, which was 
against him, as Montgomery could select his point, while 
the long strain of constant expectation would breed weak- 
ness and discontent in so mixed a garrison. 

Thus Montgomery calculated his chances, and from the 
first it will be seen that he had virtually decided on the 
bold venture in which he so bravely fell. Whatever mis- 
givings he had, he wore a brave front at least, and openly 



THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 93 

gave out, so says tradition, that he would eat his Christmas 
dinner either in Quebec or Hell, though we may suspect 
that Daniel Morgan or Arnold or possibly the garrison in 
exuberant reminiscence, interpolated the alternative. I 
am not going to linger over the various schemes of assault 
that were mooted, and how scaling-ladders were made under 
the direction of Aaron Burr of later political fame, then an 
ardent and militant youth, and how some of Walker's 
friends from Montreal came up, though not as combatants, 
but with urgent advice to attempt the lower town, as with 
true commercial insight they argued that the citizens in 
arms, fearful for their storehouses, would surrender rather 
than suffer the batteries from above to play on them. 
Montgomery, it is said, was all for attempting a preliminary 
breach in the walls, but was overruled, and possibly with 
shrewder forecast than the spirited amateurs around him, 
counted the cost. 

The plan of action was at length settled. The lower 
town was to be attacked simultaneously at the south-west 
corner below Cape Diamond and at the opposite extremity, 
where the defences dipped to the St. Charles. Arnold with 
the larger force was to attempt the latter, Montgomery with 
a smaller one the former. If successful, the two were to 
effect a junction and carry the upper town from within. 

In the meantime all went well in the city. Montgomery 
kept Christmas neither in Quebec nor in the other place, but 
in Holland House. Reports of the enemy's intentions were 
brought in by deserters or escaped detenus for several days 
in succession, each more or less specifying the night after 
their arrival as the appointed hour, and each in a manner 
right, for either the news of their escape or an unfavour- 
able turn of the weather, caused a series of postponements. 
Every man from the General at the convent of the Recollets 
in the upper town, with the defenders of that quarter, to the 
officers and privates at their several posts in the lower town, 
slept in their clothes. French and English, say all of the 
half-dozen combatants who have left us day-to-day journals 



94 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

of the siege, which sorely tax the restraint necessary to our 
space, vied with one another in spirit and energy. 

At last, in the dark of the small hours on the last morning 
of the year, at about four of the clock, Captain Malcolm Fraser 
of the Emigrants, who commanded the main guard, saw a 
rocket shoot up and fire signals flash beyond Cape Diamond. 
Judging, and rightly so, that it was the signal for attack, he 
sent men hurrying hither and thither to spread the alarm, 
and himself ran rapidly down St. Louis Street shouting 
' Turn out, turn out,' as loudly and as often as he could. 
Every one from the General downwards sprang to arms and 
hurried immediately to their posts. Drums beat and the 
bells of the city clanged their loud alarums. The morning, 
though two hours yet from dawn, after a quiet starlit night 
waxed black and boisterous with a driving snowstorm from 
the north-east, so that at some of the remoter posts neither 
drums nor even bells could be heard. But the Canadian rebels 
under Brown, making a feint against the walls, began firing so 
early that the flashes of their guns and the hurtling of some 
stray shells from St. Roch made further warning unnecessary. 

All this meant that Montgomery and about three hundred 
men had dropped down by Wolfe's Cove to the narrow strand 
between cliff and river, and were picking their way in the 
teeth of the storm over the rough, narrow, ice-encumbered 
track towards a barrier at Pr£s de Ville, the narrow entry 
to the town between the river and the rocky steep of Cape 
Diamond. Here, in a stone house by the barrier, a small 
battery under a merchant skipper, Captain Barnesfare, was 
stationed with a sergeant and fifteen sailors, while above it 
was a blockhouse garrisoned by a squad of French Canadian 
riflemen. A wealth of melodramatic accessories have been 
woven in picture magazines and elsewhere around this brief 
and simple tragedy. Poor Barnesfare has been represented 
as drunk and fleeing in panic from his guns at the sight of 
the approaching column, and then rushing back terrified but 
repentant and applying the fatal match that saved Canada. 
As a matter of fact, the stout skipper and his sergeant, 



THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 95 

peering into the dark, blustering, and snowy night, descried 
a group of men approaching, and duly fired their battery, 
with such apparent effect that they saw little or nothing 
more. They seem to have fired again for good luck into 
the void, and the riflemen in the blockhouse to have done 
the same with equal vagueness. The result was only dis- 
covered the next morning after all was over, when thirteen 
bodies with just a flicker of life in one of them were found 
lying buried in the new-fallen snow, and a single stark hand 
peering above it — a gruesome signal, one might almost 
fancy, that the body of the gallant, ill-fated leader lay 
beneath it, for the hand was Montgomery's. The whole 
advanced company had in fact fallen, and the column 
behind had fled, with no clear knowledge among them of 
what had happened, save the very just conclusion that the 
venture was a too perilous one for average men. Shortly 
afterwards a passing panic arose in this quarter of the city, 
started, it is said, by an old woman who shouted that the 
Americans had got in on the other side, as panics will be 
started among citizens playing the soldier at a critical 
moment in a stormy night. 

Arnold in the meantime had led some six to seven 
hundred men, mostly his own tried followers, from St. 
Roch against the almost equally narrow gut between 
the mouth of the St. Charles and the steep pitch of the 
town above it. Here at the Sault au Matelot a barrier 
had been erected, mounted with two cannon, and another 
some way behind it, as the Americans found to their 
cost. If Arnold had expected to surprise the guard, he 
must have been disappointed, for long before his men got 
there the bells of the city were clanging wildly, and Brown's 
Canadians were firing harmless fusilades on the plateau and 
slopes beyond the city walls, while as he passed under the 
Palace gate and the Hotel Dieu his troops were fired on 
briskly by the pickets and exposed by the glare of fire-balls 
flung from the heights above. He himself was hit in the leg 
and put hopelessly out of action, while his men, encum- 



96 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

bered with scaling-ladders, made slow progress and lost 
many of their numbers. Morgan now assumed the com- 
mand and carried the first barrier under conditions which 
are surrounded by hopelessly conflicting evidence, but of 
little importance and in any case to his credit. Following 
a slightly circuitous route, the Americans now found them- 
selves in a narrow street, the end of which was blocked by 
a second barrier strongly defended and so impregnable to 
assault that it was in fact never in danger. Behind and 
around the barrier were Highlanders and Frenchmen under 
Nairne and Voyer, soon afterwards joined by Caldwell and 
his British volunteers, who had completed their easy task of 
frightening Brown's Canadians away from the upper walls. 
Exposed to the fire of the barrier and that of one or two 
adjacent houses manned and prepared for the purpose, the 
Americans were in an awkward trap. Some of them occu- 
pied houses, but were soon driven from them into the street 
again at the point of the bayonet. After a little desultory 
fighting their position became untenable from the punish- 
ment they were receiving, while to complete their dis- 
comfiture Carleton had sent Captain Laws with seventy 
Highlanders and two guns out of the Palace gate to take 
the Americans in the rear. Here in St. Roch they encoun- 
tered a belated company of Arnold's under Dearborn, which 
after a short fight they routed or captured, destroying at 
the same time an American battery which had been active 
in that quarter. Thence wheeling round they came in over 
the outer barrier of the Sault au Matelot and cut off the 
retreat of the Americans, a few of whom, however, ventured 
the dangerous passage over the ice of the St. Charles to the 
Beauport shore. Having in the meantime received no sign 
from Montgomery and done all that men could do, the 
Americans, to the number of four hundred and thirty, forty 
of whom were wounded, laid down their arms. Thirty-two 
were reported dead. But Colonel M'Lean, who ought to 
know, states in a private letter that numbers more were 
found afterwards in the snow, and yet others when it melted 



THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 97 

in the spring, and he gives the whole total of those who fell 
at two hundred and twenty. The loss of the British, who 
were less exposed, was trifling — Captain Anderson of the 
merchant service, killed by Morgan, and five privates, with 
a like number of wounded. 

Day had now broken, and in due course the prisoners 
were marched to the upper town, paraded before Carleton, 
provided with breakfast and then with secure quarters, the 
officers in the Seminary, the men in the Recollet. A little 
later a party went out from the Pres-de-Ville and found the 
bodies of Montgomery and his companions buried by the 
snowstorm, as already related ; that of the former being 
identified at once by an American officer who accompanied 
them. He was buried with all respect under a bastion near 
the St. Louis Gate, and the spot where he fell has long been 
indicated by a tablet, while another has more recently been 
placed by his countrymen near that where he lies. He died 
a soldier's death, like his friends around him, in the act of 
adventuring an enterprise the nature of which none of them 
could estimate, and of posthumous fame he has had his full 
share. His division, however, shared in none of the honours 
of that day, which belong wholly to Arnold's corps and in 
great part to Daniel Morgan's mountaineers, whose courage 
and endurance are set forth in some detail by a good deal 
of contemporary evidence, and can be no more than acknow- 
ledged in this brief record. 

The crisis was over. French and British volunteers were 
delighted with themselves, and for once with one another. 
As for Carleton, his military capacity and cool, confident 
demeanour had been a tower of strength. ' His looks were 
watched and gave courage to many ; there was no despon- 
dency in his features. He will find a numerous band to 
follow him in every danger. He is known, and that know- 
ledge gave courage and strength to the garrison.' Naturally 
enough there was no lack of ardent spirits burning to follow 
up their success by a sally on the reduced and dispirited 
Americans. Even Caldwell and M'Lean were in favour 

G 



98 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

of it. The general, however, was too old a soldier to take 
superfluous risks for nothing. His business was to hold 
Quebec, and it was at least four months before relief could 
come. Till then they must be cut off from all the world, 
nor could they guess what reinforcements the Americans 
might bring up. But Quebec was a formidable place to 
invest in winter. It speaks well for the resolution and 
courage of this handful of raw American soldiers, scourged 
now with small-pox, and not for some little time reinforced, 
that they stuck to their task. Arnold was now in command, 
though his wound kept him in the hospital, and Wooster, an 
elderly New Englander of some military experience but 
slight initiative, and still at Montreal, succeeded to the chief 
command in Canada. Later on he exchanged with Arnold 
at Quebec. It is unnecessary to dwell on the remainder of 
the siege, which dragged its slow and uneventful length till 
the British fleet arrived in May. It is not often that the 
crisis of a five months' siege is over in the first fortnight, 
but though there were plenty of alarms, and still more 
alarming reports and a good deal of almost futile cannonad- 
ing, the city was never again in danger. Sufficiently 
victualled and with a reasonably good health record and 
plenty of confidence, the garrison, though kept well on the 
alert, were in good spirits and only eager for another 
brush with the enemy. Congress was keenly anxious to 
retain occupation of Canada if only till the spring brought 
a British force there for the moral effect they conceived it 
to have on the rest of the country. So great efforts were 
made to spare money and men, and to forward the latter 
over the long formidable snow-bound route that led to 
Canada. Fifteen hundred men, fit for duty, were at one 
time before Quebec, but the hardships and sickness there 
suffered, particularly by the earlier combatants, ill-clad, 
indifferently fed, and often unpaid, enhances the merit of 
their resolution. The winter was unusually fierce, and the 
guns on the walls, says a diarist, thirty feet above the bottom 
of the ditch, seemed lifted but little above the snow-drifts. 



THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 99 

A battery was opened at Point Levis, but its shells had little 
effect, while as a last despairing effort in April when the 
river opened, a fire-ship was sent up from the Island of 
Orleans, and in the confusion it was expected to cause an 
assault was to be attempted. But the navigator lost his 
head, left his charge prematurely, and it went blazing harm- 
lessly down the river. 

Montreal in the meantime had been the base and head- 
quarters of the occupation. No less a person than Franklin, 
with Chase and Carrol of Carrolton, in Maryland, and his 
priestly brother the future Catholic Bishop, had been there 
as a commission from Congress, the lay members to take 
stock of the situation, the priest as a fraternal envoy to the 
Canadian Church. The former did not like the look of 
things, while the priest utterly failed to impress his Canadian 
brethren. A reaction against the Americans gradually but 
surely set in. The best-intentioned of half-disciplined 
armies must in time cause friction : above all when they 
have only worthless money to exchange for goods, and the 
habitant, with some bitter experience of card money under 
Bigot, insisted on handling coin from the very first. In 
April there were no less than four thousand Congress troops 
in the colony. Military rule, too, inevitably infringed on civic 
and rural justice till the Americans in their correspondence 
begin to ask one another in despair, as their British pre- 
decessors had done, who of the British or Canadians were 
true to them and who could be depended upon. They could 
raise no more Canadian regiments as the men would not 
serve for anything but hard money, which was not to be 
had, while certain disciplinary measures that were found 
necessary were ill-taken as coming from the sons of liberty. 
The notary Badeau of Three Rivers has left us a minute and 
instructive picture of all that went on in his little town of two 
thousand souls midway between the two capitols during the 
American occupation and on their line of march. Stout 
Royalist himself, but as interpreter in close association with 
both parties, he tells us of dinners where Canadian guests 



ioo THE MAKING OF CANADA 

were wagered by American officers and took their bets in 
dozens of wine that Quebec would be taken. Of more 
importance, he paints a substantial Royalist minority who 
sang Te Deums with the nuns and priests for British 
successes, but had to act circumspectly, as pronounced 
sentiments or even statements of fact suggesting partiality 
to the Crown were forbidden under the military rule. This, 
both here and at Montreal, was sometimes unwise and irritat- 
ing though not harsh, save for the despatching of a good 
many suspected loyalists as prisoners to the middle colonies. 
Attempts were made to persuade the Canadians to elect 
representatives to a provincial assembly at Montreal, but 
the habitants as yet cared for none of these things. A 
convention of men too, who could not sign their own names, 
must have struck even the most perfervid democrat from 
Connecticut or Rhode Island as a little premature. 

The urgent despatches of Carleton and Cramahe sent 
home in the preceding summer and autumn had not been 
fruitless. On the morning of May 6th every one still abed 
sprang out of it at the joyful news that crowds were gather- 
ing at all the vantage-points of the upper town to witness 
the welcome sight of a sail forging out from the bend at 
the Point of Orleans. It was a British frigate, the Surprise, 
to be quickly followed by the I sis sloop-of-war. It was soon 
known that they had troops on board, and better still, were 
but the harbingers of a substantial armament even now 
upon the sea. For the immediate purpose, however, there 
proved to be marines and infantry sufficient, and when all of 
these, some two hundred in number, were landed, and in 
order, the drums beat to arms and the joyful order went out 
that all the French and English militia were to join the troops 
and seamen in the long-wished-for attack on the foe who 
had for so long hemmed them in. Marching out of the 
St. Louis and St. John's Gates headed by Carleton, the 
little army reached the old battlefield of St. Foy without 
opposition, where it extended itself in line, the new-comers 
in the centre and the French militia as a reserve, ' making/ 



THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 101 

says one joyous diarist, ' a noble appearance.' The Congress 
troops were seen gathering from every direction, but not, as 
it proved to the others' disappointment, for battle. They 
were under the command of General Thomas, of Bunker 
Hill fame, Wooster having been removed as incompetent, 
and having already recognised that the game was up were 
preparing for retreat. It was a pity that an army, part of 
which at least had borne itself with such fortitude, should 
not have been a little more or a little less expeditious in its 
departure. As it was, they executed a somewhat disorganised 
flight in face of the enemy. Nine hundred Pennsylvanians 
took ambush in the woods for a brief period, but soon took 
to their heels with the rest ' They left cannon, muskets, 
ammunition, and even clothes,' says an eye-witness ; ' we 
found the roads strewn with these, while bread and pork all 
lay in heaps on the highway with howitzers and field-pieces. 
So great was their panic that they left behind them many 
papers of consequence to those who wrote them and to 
whom they were writ. Look which way soever one could, 
men were flying and carts driving away with all possible 
speed.' There was no attempt, however, at pursuit, and it 
was a bloodless victory. 

One may fairly credit Carleton with this. To his 
soldierly qualities he added that of mercy in a very marked 
degree. Strong cause for resentment as he had towards 
the Americans, he always evinced a reluctance to shed 
their blood or even to inflict unnecessary suffering. He 
had caused the prisoners captured at the assault to be 
well cared for, and only on the discovery of a plot for 
escaping had been reduced to harsher measures. An 
American force, which had latterly occupied Point Levis 
with their batteries, had at this moment no open route for 
escape but the wild forests to the southward. A day or 
two later Carleton issued strict orders that the woods 
should be diligently searched, and any American fugitives 
in distress should be brought to the general hospital and 
properly cared for ; concluding with the further promise, 



102 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

made known by proclamation, that as soon as their health 
was restored they should be set free to return to their 
respective provinces. Yet there was no man alive who had 
more cause to feel aggrieved at their action than Carleton, 
and oddly enough he was the one solitary British general 
who left off the better of them in this unfortunate war. 

More transports now came dropping into the basin of 
Quebec, and Carleton was able to start up the river with 
the 29th and 47th Regiments for Three Rivers, the base 
decided on for further movements against the enemy. 
Before going he dismissed his trusty volunteers to their 
civic duties with the thanks they had well earned. By 
June 1st he was back again in time to receive Burgoyne 
with the rest of the expeditionary force which arrived upon 
that day. 

All was now rejoicing. The river was alive with shipping 
and the Chateau St. Louis, gay with the resplendent 
uniforms of the British and German officers, for the King's 
birthday on the 4th was celebrated at an auspicious 
moment for Canada. Besides the two regiments already 
pushed on to Three Rivers, the 21st, 24th, 31st, 34th, 53rd, 
and 63rd were here with four batteries of artillery. Of 
Brunswickers there were three infantry regiments, three of 
dismounted dragoons, with a corps of Hessians, all under 
Baron Riedesel, whose gallant wife joined him later to face 
the perils of Burgoyne's campaign and add another to the 
list of foreigners whose pen-pictures and journals during 
these wars have laid every one interested in them under 
such uncommon obligations. Little recked these proud 
battalions, who this year were to form Carleton's army 
for the purging of Canada and as much more as might 
be, and Burgoyne's more definitely aggressive force for the 
next, what lay in store for them. The habitants about and 
below Quebec, fickle enough from lack of experience, per- 
haps, rather than temperament, discovered that they had 
made a mistake, once more listened to their priests, and 
above all went to farm work again cheerful in the best 



THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 103 

market prospects for hay and grain that had probably 
ever been theirs. The price of wheat was no longer settled 
by an Intendant, for the habitant had become an exporter. 
The British merchant, with all his intolerance, had at 
least made an open market, put money in his pocket, and 
stimulated his simple prosperity. Little need be said of 
Carleton's rapid march at the head of the greater part of 
his now ample force in pursuit of the Americans. Fraser, 
one of his brigadiers, who fell afterwards at Saratoga, had 
a brush with two thousand of the enemy beyond Three 
Rivers, but there was no other fighting, and the Americans 
travelled so expeditiously that Sorel, Montreal, Chambly, and 
St. John's were all evacuated by the time the British in two 
divisions reached them. Canada was cleared by June 25th, 
and the general found himself over the border looking up 
Lake Champlain, recently furrowed by southern-bound 
American keels, in a somewhat helpless situation so far 
as further enterprise was concerned. For there was as 
yet no road to speak of along the rugged and then 
wooded and swampy shores of this long ninety miles of 
lake, while the Americans had been careful to leave no 
vestige of any shipping for the transport of troops and 
even found time in their hurry to bum all the craft they 
did not want. Carleton had urged the Home Government 
to send out many things besides soldiers necessary to 
campaigning in this region, artificers and boats in sections 
among them, but they had sent neither the one nor the 
other, and he was now at a standstill. Germain, the most 
impossible and unpopular minister who had ever been in 
charge of national undertakings, was now at the helm. 
As Lord George Sackville he had been cashiered for 
cowardice in the field at Minden. The Lords had even 
protested on that account against his taking his seat in 
their House. He had neither tact nor ability, and was 
arrogant, vindictive and narrow-minded. But he suited 
George the Third and was now a principal Secretary of 
State conducting a critical war in a country the very nature 



104 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

of which he had not taken the pains to understand. He 
hated Carleton for having ignored a placeman he had 
shipped to Canada, and showed his dislike so plainly in 
several futile despatches that he received a series of as 
contemptuously ironical letters as a British general ever 
wrote to a Secretary of State. Carleton had done most 
things in his time, but never before had he to build a 
fleet and command it himself. The building took a long 
time. The country had been denuded of everything, and 
Carleton himself shut up for months in Quebec. There 
was scarcely any skilled labour, and every plank had to be 
sawn from the woods with inadequate machinery, while the 
Americans were in force at Crown Point and Ticonderoga, 
at the head of the lake, with the intention of blocking the 
road to the Hudson and the south. 

Arnold, it will be remembered, had been commanding in 
Montreal since April, and he had a narrow escape of being 
caught there by Generals Riedesel and Philips. But in 
May, while Quebec was being relieved, there had been some 
fighting between his command and an enterprising British 
officer, Captain Forster, who belonged to the far-away 
garrison at Detroit but was on duty at Oswegatchic, some 
fifty miles above Montreal, with forty men of the 8th 
Regiment and a few volunteers. On hearing of the relief 
of Quebec he reflected that a demonstration against 
Montreal could at least do no harm, so with his small 
party and two hundred Indians he felt his way there. 
At the Cedars he found an American major and four 
hundred men with some guns barring this path. Joined, 
however, by De Senneville, a local seignior, and a few score 
Canadians, he forced the position and captured its de- 
fenders. Arnold, however, now came on from Montreal 
with fifteen hundred men, and Forster had no alternative 
but to re-cross the mouth of the Ottawa to Vaudreuil. 
Arnold followed to St. Anne's on the hither shore, and 
skirting the rapids made famous by Tom Moore, occupied 
the old fortified stone chateau of De Senneville known as 



THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 105 

Boisbriant on the shore of the Lake-of-the-Two-Mountains. 
Advancing across the lake in bateaux against Forster, he 
was repulsed, and after setting fire to the fort returned 
to Montreal. But a fortnight of skirmishing, unnecessary 
to touch upon here, resulted in Forster giving up four 
hundred and thirty prisoners, to be exchanged later for an 
equal number of the Royalists taken the preceding year 
at St. John's^ The contract was broken by Congress, 
which created much indignation on the British side and 
not a little in some quarters on the other. The old 
fortalice of Boisbriant, built about 1700, still displays its 
ruins picturesquely set in the grounds of a country house 
by the lake shore. It is in part roof-high, and overhung 
by forest trees presents the most suggestive relic of 
ancient frontier warfare in all Canada and probably in 
North America. As this story is concerned solely with 
Canada, we need not follow Carleton and his fleet, which 
was not ready till October, up Champlain, nor describe the 
two victories he gained over Arnold, who had also become 
an admiral for the occasion, and a sufficiently clever one 
to escape most skilfully with his sloops from his first 
defeat, though utterly destroyed as regards his ships in 
the second. Nor need we enter into the reasons which 
influenced Carleton against sitting down to a probably 
protracted siege of Ticonderoga with only a month of 
campaigning weather left him so far from his base, and 
with no strong reasons for occupying so advanced a post 
through the winter which could be taken with certainty in 
the spring. So it was decided to retire to the foot of the 
lake and go into winter quarters in Canada. The decision 
was a weighty one, as it was made a handle by Germain 
for superseding Carleton ; and had Carleton led Burgoyne's 
expedition, it is most improbable that he would have got 
into Burgoyne's scrape, in which case the future course of 
the War of Independence suggests infinite possibilities for 
interesting but futile speculation. Germain fully believed 
that British troops could campaign in the northern wilder- 



106 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

ness in midwinter, and his criticisms were based upon 
this entirely fatuous notion. The presence of eight or nine 
thousand regular troops in the various centres and posts 
of Canada through the winter of 1776-7 was an economic 
and social situation unprecedented in the annals of the 
colony with a total population even yet of scarcely a 
hundred thousand souls. Never in the palmiest days of 
the French regime, when Quebec did its utmost to atone 
by its isolation and limitations by its social energy and 
ceremonial observances, had this old city-stronghold of 
soldiers and priests been anything like so gay, and never 
had money circulated so plentifully and so freely. Lady 
Maria was now back at Quebec, and on the last night of 
1776, the first anniversary of Montgomery's attack, Carleton 
gave a dinner of sixty covers, followed by a public fete 
and a grand ball where all social Quebec danced out the 
old year which had broken on them in so dramatic and 
different a fashion. On the same morning the Archbishop 
celebrated a grand mass in the cathedral, and those citizens 
who had shown open sympathy with the invaders had to 
do penance in public. The Church, which had received a 
serious flight, breathed again. The upper classes, a 
hundred of whose more adventurous sons were sharing the 
captivity of their British brothers-in-arms in the south, and 
who fully shared in the triumphs of the past year, were 
in the best of humours. They had a recognised place in 
the Legislative Council, while small grievances, that later 
on assumed larger proportions, were for the present in 
abeyance. As regards the inscrutable habitant, to try and 
imagine the sort of talk that went on round the hot stove 
of his air-tight kitchen and between the puffs of his home- 
grown tobacco is an interesting but irrelevant speculation. 
The priest had him once more safe under his wing, and 
no doubt made the most of such opportunities as the 
excellent market and the removal of pestilent republican 
influences gave him. 

Burgoyne, whose social gifts as a play wright and composer 



THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 107 

I 

of light verses would have been invaluable to Quebec that 
winter, went home on urgent domestic business, and also 
with a view to discussing the plan of campaign that Carleton, 
in counsel with himself and others, had made for the next 
summer. Burgoyne, though his plays were acted at Drury 
Lane, his verses the delight of great ladies, and his speeches 
in the House of Commons always welcomed, was also 
a good soldier, and devoted both to his profession and to 
his wife, whose serious condition was the cause of his 
temporary absence. He had distinguished himself greatly 
in the front of battle, and if not seriously tested as a 
tactician, his notes on European armies had been much 
valued by Chatham. He knew nothing, however, of the 
peculiar conditions of American warfare, and seems not 
only to have deferred to Carleton's experience, but to have 
explained his proposals to Government with all honesty and 
such approval as his own might be worth. Germain, how- 
ever, was not weighing the fitness of one officer against an- 
other when he sent out Burgoyne to supersede Carleton in 
command of what proved the ill-fated expedition of 1777. 
He hated Carleton, who had shown as much contempt for 
him as official etiquette permitted, and took no pains to hide 
his vindictiveness. Carleton was no mean performer with 
his pen, and Germain's ill-instructed orders and criticisms 
had laid him open to retorts that a far inferior despatch- 
writer in a North American command could have penned 
effectively had he dared. Carleton, like very many of his 
contemporaries, thought of Germain as the poltroon who had 
brought disgrace on the English cavalry at Minden in the 
first place, and as a fool in the second, and yet worse, an 
arrogant, narrow-minded, vindictive fool. The former's 
despatches are piquant to a degree, and I have dealt with 
them elsewhere. 1 Burgoyne returned to Quebec in the 
spring, almost at the moment Carleton received Germain's 
letter confining his sphere of authority to his own govern- 
ment, that of Canada, and notifying the appointment of 

1 Life of Dorchester. 



108 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

Burgoyne to the command of the force destined to act 
against the colonies. Sir Guy at once sent home his resigna- 
tion. But in those days of slow travel officials could not 
be replaced in a month, nor was Carleton's situation easy to 
fill, and he remained for a year busy and loyal as ever in 
spite of his just mortification. Nor was Burgoyne himself 
made to feel the other's chagrin, invidious as his position 
was. He told the House of Commons at a later day that 
if Carleton had been preparing for an expedition he was 
himself to lead, or been actually his own brother, he could 
not have laboured more indefatigably. Burgoyne, moreover, 
brought out a new plan from Germain, and no bad one, if 
the minister in his culpable carelessness had not omitted to 
instruct the second and equally interested party in it. It is 
a tolerably familiar one : how Burgoyne was to advance on 
the Hudson, and there join hands with Howe, who was 
simultaneously to ascend the river from New York whither 
he had now moved from Boston. But Germain unfortun- 
ately forgot to mention the matter to Howe ! The story 
runs that the despatch to that lethargic general was pigeon- 
holed, and overlooked by the minister while enjoying a few 
days in the country. At any rate Howe never got it, and 
was sailing south for Philadelphia when the despairing 
Burgoyne was looking for him on the upper Hudson. 

Carleton's plan, which had been to make Ticonderoga a 
base, and operate thence against the New England colonies 
as circumstances allowed, does not concern us. Nor indeed 
do the adventures and the fate of that fine army of 
seven thousand men which Burgoyne led to disaster at 
Saratoga, save that Canada despatched them, remained for 
long in touch with their movements, and for the whole time 
an anxious spectator of events. Carleton's officers, even 
those not yet familiar with American campaigning, who 
in the preceding October had criticised his Fabian policy, 
parted with him regretfully at St. John's. How they 
traversed Lake Champlain, occupied Ticonderoga without 
resistance, and then wandered into the wilderness that was 



THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 109 

to envelop them, as I have said, is no part of this story. 
The belief of the Home Government that Canadian militia 
could be freely and profitably raised was not yet scotched. 
Carleton was against any further muster, other than of those 
anxious to serve, as superfluous and likely to arouse the 
habitants' old suspicions of foreign service. A considerable 
number, however, were mustered, and for the most part 
deserted on the first opportunity. Another and much 
smaller expedition was despatched at the same time from 
Canada. It was under Colonel St. Leger, and was to 
advance by Lake Ontario and the Mohawk valley, force the 
posts there, which were occupied by Congress troops, and 
join Burgoyne on the Hudson. This also was frustrated by 
the strength of the opposition it encountered, and St. Leger 
brought his men back to Canada before the news arrived 
that on October 20th Burgoyne had surrendered. In the 
face of this the small garrison left at Ticonderoga was 
withdrawn to Canada, and the famous fortress was dis- 
mantled and left to relapse into groups of still upstanding 
roofless walls of weather-worn masonry that have served to 
remind generations of careless holiday-makers in a now 
much-frequented region of two famous and epoch-making 
wars. 

Domestic affairs in the meantime were at a lull, and the 
Government at Quebec almost wholly concerned with 
warlike measures. The new Legislative Council had not 
met since its brief session in 1775. The Quebec Act had 
not yet been put in operation, nor the courts of justice 
placed upon a proper footing. Carleton had been com- 
pelled at the time, by the confusion of the country, to 
nominate the judges himself — three at Quebec and Montreal 
respectively, two of whom were French. A clause in the 
Act had annulled all appointments held prior to it, but 
Carleton had supported this as a form only, and a useful 
instrument rather for evicting such as had failed in their 
capacity or duty. Germain, however, looked upon it as an 
admirable opportunity for foisting proteges on the Canadian 



no THE MAKING OF CANADA 

establishment. So the correspondence between the minis- 
ter and Carleton on this subject became as acrid as in 
matters of war. ' I should have reproached myself,' wrote 
the latter, 'with an abuse of power and trust, if under the 
sanction of that cause I had turned out any of the King's 
inferior servants who had executed the duties of their office 
with integrity and honour. Two judges of Montreal have 
been turned out by your Lordship's nominees, and I own 'tis 
unfortunate that your Lordship should find it necessary for 
the King's service to send over a person [Livius, shortly 
afterwards made Chief-Justice] to administer justice to the 
people when he understands neither their laws, manners, 
customs nor language, and that he must turn out a gentle- 
man who has held it with reputation for many years, well 
allied in the province, and a considerable sufferer for his 
attachment to his duty both as a magistrate and a loyal 
subject.' Carleton's estimate was well justified by the fact of 
the evicted judge returning to England and within a reason- 
able time becoming Master of the Rolls as Sir William 
Grant! As to Livius, a German Portuguese with a legal 
experience gained in New England, he is described as 
'greedy of gain, imperious and impetuous in his temper, but 
learned in the ways and eloquence of New England, valuing 
himself particularly on his knowledge of how to manage 
governors.' 

After Burgoyne's surrender there was another alarm of 
invasion, though there were nearly four thousand regulars in 
the colony. The American troops were in great part no 
longer raw militia, but hardened and experienced cam- 
paigners. A militia bill had been passed making every 
able-bodied male liable to be called out in defence of his 
country, a measure which the habitants regarded as a great 
hardship. However, in the autumn of 1777 Carleton called 
out one-third of the force from the Three Rivers and 
Montreal districts, and the muster under Tonnancour, de 
Longueuil and De Lanaudiere was tolerably successful. 
But the alarm passed away, and the men were disbanded. 



THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC in 

A new Governor had at length been nominated in the 
person of General Haldimand. ' I have long and im- 
patiently looked out for the arrival of a successor/ wrote 
Carleton to Germain. ' Happy at last to learn his near 
approach that into hands less obnoxious to your Lord- 
ship I may resign the important commands with which I 
have been honoured. Thus for the King's service as will- 
ingly I lay them down as for his service I took them up/ 

Haldimand arrived in Quebec on June 26, 1778, and 
Carleton returned in the same vessel, after more than eleven 
years of service and nearly eight of actual residence. He 
was the only British general who recrossed the Atlantic 
during this hapless period wearing the laurels of victory, 
and of all generals his task had perhaps been the hardest. 
He little suspected that ten years later he would be again 
recalled to the thorny seat of which he had in truth and 
with good reason grown somewhat weary. 



ii2 THE MAKING OF CANADA 



CHAPTER VI 

THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 

General Sir Frederick Haldimand, the new governor 
and Commander-in-Chief in Canada, as already noted, was 
the most conspicuous of those Swiss officers in the British 
service who served the King in America with such uncom- 
mon fidelity and intelligence. Commencing his military 
career as a youth in the Sardinian army, he then appears to 
have served under Frederick the Great, and later on was 
certainly an officer in the Swiss Guards of William of 
Orange. He had come to America in 1756 as one of a large 
number of foreign officers destined for service in the four 
battalions of the Royal Americans, afterwards the 60th 
Rifles, which were being raised very largely from German- 
speaking settlers in the middle colonies. Of one of these 
he assumed the command, and served through the French 
war in America with more than credit, being wounded in 
the pitiful slaughter to which Abercrombie exposed the 
flower of the British forces in his fatuous assault upon the 
French works at Ticonderoga — the heaviest punishment 
this, wrote Haldimand, that in all his experience he had 
ever known troops to face unflinchingly. After the war he 
held chief command in Florida, New York and, as will be 
remembered, at Three Rivers during 'the Rule of the 
Soldiers' in Canada. No man probably had enjoyed a 
wider personal experience of American affairs, both civil 
and military, than he. For nearly twenty consecutive years 
he had been intimately associated as friend or foe, in uneasy 
peace or laborious war, with the far-scattered communities 



THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 113 

and various races, white and red, that were now busy wiping 
out old lines of cleavage for new ones, breaking with their 
past and repainting the map of North America. Haldimand 
had just spent some three years in England, where he was 
liked by society, the army, and the ministry, and now 
returned to North America to see the finish of that thirty 
years' drama which beginning with Braddock's defeat and 
ending with an Anglo-French Canada, recast the continent 
from the Gulf of Mexico to Hudson's Bay. A mad world 
enough it would have seemed to any man, French or 
English, but thirty years dead, could he have risen from 
his grave by the James, the Hudson or the St. Lawrence, 
and roamed it again. A British flag flying on the citadel 
of Quebec, South Carolinians and Pennsylvanians ploughing 
the cold northern shores of Lake Ontario, and a strange 
device fluttering on every public building from Boston to 
Charleston, with the lilies of France hoisted in amity beside 
it. But all this was not quite yet. 

Haldimand was a monument of method and the keenest 
of observers, if not always the truest of prophets, though 
it is easy to prophesy a century afterwards. As a writer 
and, above all, as a collector of letters and documents, 
England and America owe to him, as to his friend and 
brother-officer and fellow-countryman, Bouquet, a great 
debt had he done nothing else, whereas he was always 
doing something and generally doing it well. As a recent 
biographer justly remarks, it was Haldimand's lot when 
in sole command, civil or military, to be always on the 
defensive, a simple enough matter among a united and 
homogeneous community. But most of the stationary 
commands in the America of that epoch must have been 
far more distracting, and much more destructive of official 
nerve and tissue, than campaigning even in North America. 
Haldimand, however, seems to have borne it well, and 
though we left Canada in the last chapter apparently secure 
and content, she contained in her geographical situation, as 
well as in her social elements, material for a world of 

H 



U4 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

anxiety even yet Haldimand, moreover, had a difficult 
man to follow in Carleton, whose popularity is all the more 
significant for his coldness of manner and somewhat lofty 
demeanour, noticed even by his successor, who sums him 
up nevertheless in a private letter to England with brief 
eulogy as 'a perfect gentleman, and one of the ablest officers 
in the service.' 

One must not be tempted here, however, into the maze 
of the Haldimand correspondence outside that more perti- 
nent portion of it which has helped to write history. It 
will be enough to say, before resuming the thread of our 
narrative, that a somewhat unfair impression is given in 
condensed histories of Canada that Haldimand was an 
indifferent pro-consul, a fact mainly due, it is suggested, to 
his being a foreigner, and it may possibly be that his 
actions, which were generally those of wisdom and sanity, 
had a suspicion of the commanding officer about them, and 
lacked the grace and instinct for governing — the adroit 
combination of velvet glove and iron hand which dis- 
tinguished the best type of British Governors in such 
marked degree. The situation of Canada since Burgoyne's 
defeat had in fact again become precarious, and since 
France, influenced by that great disaster, had openly 
espoused the American cause, the danger seemed im- 
measurably aggravated, both from the access of fighting 
strength she brought to the colonies, and even more from the 
strain such a situation would and did put on the loyalty of 
the ' new subjects.' Another proclamation was now nailed 
up on every parish church door, signed by no less a person 
than Admiral D'Estaing. He reminded the people that 
they were French and could not cease to be so ; nor could 
they raise parricidal hands against their mother country or 
her allies. As a noble himself, he appealed to the nobles 
to remember that there was only one august house under 
which Frenchmen could serve with honour and be happy. 
The memory of Montcalm was invoked, and much more to 
the same effect, while he appealed to the clergy and the 



THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 115 

people in language suited to their respective situations. 
American emissaries too were again busy in the parishes. 
Common-sense seems against the habitant entertaining 
for a moment a reversion to that ancient state of things, the 
mere traces of which had formed his stock - in - trade of 
complaint against the British Government, and D'Estaing 
had openly hinted at a renewal of the old connection, 
though he well knew France had pledged herself against it 
to Congress. The seigniors and the Church, however, had 
no such practical reasons to reject the notion of the old 
regime, and with these the attachments of race and creed 
were of course even stronger. Fortunately they were not 
seriously tested. The situation indeed appeared worse to 
Haldimand than it actually was. Canadian governors of 
that day were deplorably cut off from news of the outer 
world, and this isolation added greatly to their difficulties. 
Haldimand, for instance, could not guess that Washington 
was quite determined that if Canada was not American it 
should be English, and not only that, but in any expedition 
undertaken against the province the French should play a 
very minor part. The test would come if Frenchmen 
should be called to fight against Frenchmen. Would the 
hate of the priest and seignior for the Bastonnais be strong 
enough to turn the scale? Would the memories of the 
ancient regime, the forced corvees, the card money, the 
compulsory unpaid soldiering, the old arrogant pretensions, 
as they now professed to think them, of the seignior, the 
official corruption and interference with the price of grain, 
steel the heart of the habitant against the eloquence of their 
French brethren? Was it possible that the sight of a 
French uniform would wipe out these memories? Or 
again, would they forget D'Estaing's proclamation, and 
regard their compatriots as security only for the abound- 
ing promises of the Bastonnais fighting by their side ? 
That the latter were not everywhere repudiated there is 
evidence in a letter to Haldimand from a German colonel 
reporting that the Maypoles near Three Rivers were 



n6 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

decorated with Republican colours. None of these problems 
fortunately were put to the test, though Haldimand took 
every precaution. He built blockhouses on the Chaudiere, 
down which Arnold had followed his adventurous course. 
He did the same on the St. Francis, a back-door route of 
the Vermonters to Canada. He condemned St. John's and 
Chambly as weak posts, though repairing them for an 
outer defence, and concentrated his main defensive works 
on Sorel, which seigniory, oddly enough, had become the 
property of a firm of London merchants. He did not 
confine himself to such negative measures, but with a force 
under Major Carleton, Sir Guy's nephew, who had also 
married his wife's sister, destroyed the American settle- 
ments that had recently appeared along the shores of Lake 
Champlain as forming useful food supplies for an invading 
force, and finding justification for his action in their harsh 
treatment and expulsion of loyalists. He was continually 
importuning the Government for reinforcements. Three 
reduced, but otherwise efficient, British regiments, in all 
1200 men, and about 2000 Brunswickers, mainly composed 
of the least efficient of the German contingent, with a few 
Canadian volunteers, were all he had got, though there 
were now over 50,000 British troops in America. He 
begged also for one or two ships of war to winter in 
Quebec, as a French fleet from Boston might slip up in the 
spring at the opening of navigation and hold Canada at 
its mercy ; but he got neither and, as it turned out, had no 
need of them. He was very active, however, in equipping 
merchant vessels for scouting after privateers about the 
mouth of the St. Lawrence, and keeping his isolated 
province in some sort of touch with the warring world 
without. In Carleton's time the British western country, 
though nominally Canadian, and if not actually engaged in 
a frontier war, yet on the fringe of the contest, and further- 
more embarrassed with a doubtful Indian and French 
population, had ignored the fact that Quebec was its head- 
quarters. Commanding officers at Niagara, Detroit, and in 



THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 117 

the forts of the Ohio and Illinois countries, had corre- 
sponded direct with the Home Government, to the detriment 
of good service and any lucid plan of action. Haldimand 
had insisted on full powers over this distracted hinterland, 
and he now had his hands full as the struggle had over- 
flowed into regions where three of the four parties con- 
cerned, to wit, the French, the Indians, and the British 
American traders, usually took the winning side of the 
moment, and were prepared to swear allegiance, in their 
loose fashion, to the British officer or the American 
partisan who for the moment had the upper hand. It is 
enough to say that the important posts of Niagara and 
Detroit, virtually within the zone of the Canada that counts 
for us in this narrative, held their own. The unfortunate 
exploits to the south-westward of Hamilton, the governor 
of Detroit, his memorable capture at Vincennes by the 
redoubtable George Rogers Clark, and his brutal treatment 
by the same is, with the suppression of such unpleasant 
accessories, a famous and familiar tale in America to-day. 
But all these things belong to the greater war, though 
occurring in the vast western wilderness, the inclusion of 
which in the Quebec Act was the latter's weakest point. 
They form a tangled tale of petites guerres much better 
reading than most fiction which deals with such affairs, and 
equally dramatic, but unintelligible without illustrating 
maps, and. as I have said, but vaguely bearing on our 
story. 

Somewhat more pertinent, however, are those operations 
undertaken from Niagara in the valley of the Mohawk and 
the upper Susquehanna, chiefly headed by the vigorous 
British partisan Butler, the descendants of whose redoubt- 
able corps of ' Rangers ' now swarm on the fertile farms of 
the Niagara country. The primary object of these raids, com- 
menced in 1778, the summer of Haldimand's arrival, was 
the destruction of the base of supply for the constantly 
threatened hostile expeditions against Niagara. The Six 
Nations, too, in their ancient haunts on the Mohawk, had 



n8 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

been a source of vast perplexity to the now contending and 
divided British, who in former days were generally sure of 
their allegiance against their common enemy, the French. 
That the Indians themselves shared the feeling of uncer- 
tainty to at least an equal degree goes without saying. 
The traditional alliance with the British, though sometimes 
infringed, had been as nearly a guiding principle as the red 
man was capable of. It was much weakened now by the 
British split, and King George, one might say, was the only 
name to conjure with. That of Johnson would perhaps have 
been a stronger prop, but the redoubtable backwoods 
baronet, leader and diplomat had closed his vigorous, pic- 
turesque career at his patriarchal fortress on the Mohawk 
just before the first shot of the struggle was fired, and his 
nephew and son-in-law Guy, as Indian superintendent, and 
his son, Sir John, ruled much less successfully at Johnson 
Hall in his stead. There had been much talk about the 
employment of Indians in this war. The difficulty lay in 
retaining as neutrals a fighting race whose interests and 
property came within the desolating zone of strife. No 
man could weigh the chances of a sheer fight between the 
redcoats and the continentals better than the savage who 
had seen so much of both, though of the wider influences 
operating in war he could form little notion. The value of 
discipline, both in the French and Pontiac's wars, had been 
obvious in many a crisis. Brilliant at times, the irregular 
had always a crop, and perhaps a family at home tugging at 
his heart-strings. Like the Indian himself, he was more 
easily disheartened by a repulse, and more apt to consult 
his own personal safety in withdrawal, for reasons too 
obvious to need elaboration. The redcoat in 1778 was 
justly regarded as a more reliable ally by the Indian, and 
more likely to stand by him in a tight place. For one thing, 
he had less temptation to give way, and had his back, so to 
speak, against the wall ; and for another, the sense of dis- 
cipline often made unconscious heroes of English rustics or 
wastrels on a shilling a day, facing not merely death but 



THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 119 

often the possibilities of unspeakable torture in these wild 
woods. The British soldier as well as officer had learned a 
good deal since Braddock's time, as any one following him 
through the bloody mazes of Pontiac's war well knows, and 
with what he had learned he combined his incomparable 
staunchness and skill with the bayonet, not by any means 
the useless ornament it is sometimes represented by the 
writers of picturesque articles in these bush and stockade 
combats. The Indians knew all this very well, but they 
could not then foresee that the loose-fighting, uneven pro- 
vincial soldiers would have time and opportunity to grow 
also into veteran troops and learn in the severest of schools 
the sense of discipline. The Indians, however, such as 
fought at all — for they were only encouraged to a limited 
extent in this war—though partisans of the British, did not 
prove of great value. Both sides bidding for them, they 
were encouraged to draw rations for their families as the 
price of their neutrality and became as often a burden as a 
help. Moreover, the difficulty of restraining their passion 
for scalps was a hideous responsibility on every British 
leader. It was in this frontier war for the defence of Canada 
that the destruction of the Susquehanna settlements came 
about, made famous by Campbell's probably best known 
poem of Gertrude of Wyoming which, thirty years after- 
wards, made a great sensation in England. The poet's 
idyllic picture of an American frontier settlement cast in a 
mellow, leisurely, old-world atmosphere ; the happy valley, 
frisking peasants, and innocent pipe-playing swains, with 
some stage-backwoods accessories, is of course grotesque, 
if a single detail be considered at all. While far from having 
1 nought to do but feed their flocks on green declivities,' the 
Wyoming settlers had been extremely busy arresting all 
those among them suspected of loyalist sentiments and 
despatching them to prisons in Connecticut. His poor 
Highland countrymen, whose peace, so ruthlessly shattered 
by Butler's Indians, the poet especially compassionated, had, 
on the contrary, been made a particular victim of sometime 



120 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

ere this by his neighbours, unless perchance he had got safe 
away to join M'Lean's Royal Emigrants at Quebec. His 
scalp was therefore inadvertently saved by the very trucu- 
lency of the gentle swains from whose opinions he differed, 
and as regards his humble home and the fair sheaves from 
which the Scottish bard pictures him, not very felicitously, 
as distilling whisky for his own consumption, they had both 
been already annexed by his friends of the other political 
complexion. So the Indian torch made things no worse 
for him or for the Dutch, who had been the other principal 
victim of the sons of liberty. So far from being peaceful 
and innocent swains, the Wyoming settlers had been 
advanced and extremely intolerant politicians and had 
shown the courage of their opinions by taking the field in 
unusual strength. It was the centre of an organisation then 
forming for an attack upon the villages of the Six Nations on 
the Mohawk and on Niagara. Butler's raid was in anticipa- 
tion of this, and he took with him some five hundred Rangers 
and Indians. There were eight palisaded blockhouses which 
he first captured, and he was then encountered by three hun- 
dred and odd Congress militiamen, whose colonel challenged 
the Rangers. The former were entirely defeated, and the 
Indians, who had lost heavily under St. Leger the year 
before, now broke from control and gave no quarter, killing 
and scalping two hundred and twenty-seven men, only one 
being killed on the other side. The immediate cause of 
defeat is stated by eye-witnesses on both sides to have been 
the stupidity of the American drummer, who sounded a 
retreat when told to beat the charge. The sight of the 
enemies' backs was too much for the savages, who had been 
stationed apart behind a hill, under Captain Burd of the 
8th Regiment, and had no chief of consequence to control 
them. Butler then laid waste the settlement, destroying a 
quantity of houses, eight forts, and several mills, and bring- 
ing away a thousand head of cattle, besides other stock. 
These were harsh if, from the Canadian point of view, 
necessary measures. Without attempting to palliate the 



THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 121 

conduct of the Indians, Butler's despatch to Haldimand 
distinctly states that no harm was done to a single indi- 
vidual not in arms. The natural answer to this was an 
onslaught in force the following year upon the towns of the 
Six Nations by General Sullivan, which were destroyed, 
and the ancient strongholds of this famous confederation 
wiped off the map. In return for Wyoming such loyalist 
settlements as could be reached were destroyed, to which 
Butler and the famous Indian chief Brant replied in kind 
by further devastations. And thus the partisan warfare 
raged back and forth with relentless fury, Niagara, the key 
to western Canada, being always in the mind of both parties. 
To the west, in the Ohio, Wabash, and Illinois country, 
beyond civilisation, companies of regulars for the most part 
on the one side, and Virginia and Pennsylvania borderers on 
the other, had campaigned laboriously against one another 
among Indians, mostly neutral, and isolated groups of 
Frenchmen, wholly so. This huge territory, roughly marked 
by the present States of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and 
Illinois, could in no case have been held, even had the 
defeated party been able to insist on its retention at the 
peace. The restless wave of western progress was already 
breaking on its fringes. Nothing but the sheer force of 
large permanent garrisons could have withstood it, and even 
such resistance would have bred something like frenzy in 
the dammed-up torrent of lawless frontiermen, and created 
a friction, compared to which the right of search and fishery 
disputes and remote delimitation questions, which were to 
raise trouble between the countries, were by comparison 
almost academic ones. Nor were the men who crossed the 
Ohio of the kind prepared to settle on British soil with 
an idea of remaining British subjects. They would have 
started with the hatred of England that the ruder American 
of that period, who could not rightly understand the quarrel, 
shared to the full with those of his countrymen who could. 
In no case would they have remained quiet under any form 
of government that the England of that or even a much 



122 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

later day was likely to grant a raw community. And when 
it is further remembered that the prevailing element among 
them was Scotch Irish, but a slight knowledge of the insane 
policy that drained the sturdiest blood of eighteenth-century 
Ulster, and the kind of feelings it carried with it into 
America, is needed to realise the hopeless prospect offered 
to Canada of retaining the west. Even the milder type of 
law-abiding Republican who drifted by hundreds, nay thou- 
sands, into Canada on the heels of the U.E. loyalists after 
the war, from the northern frontiers of New England and 
New York, though a small minority, gave some trouble. 
To those who have interested themselves historically in the 
communities typified by men like Boone and Sevier, Clarke 
and Shelby, Robertson and Kenton, and yet more have 
tasted the atmosphere in which their virile spirits were 
bred, the notion of them proving docile under the most 
diplomatic colonel of British infantry who ever governed 
an eighteenth-century western territory is inconceivable. 
While the crude assembly which they would have had or 
died for — for they had all been politicians to the extent of 
jealously governing themselves in some remote trough of 
the Alleghanies with much rude assurance and common- 
sense — would never have tolerated the not unreasonable, and 
for the time even liberal, methods by which the Crown kept 
Canada in modified contentment for the next half-century. 
They were, in truth, a peculiar type of colonial Briton, for 
that was their breed, flavoured slightly with some earlier Celtic 
strains, and more recently with Germanic stocks. Driven 
in their own or a former generation from the old Ulster 
colony, watered with their blood and by their labour con- 
verted into a second North Britain, they resented outside 
interference in the ruder homes they had maintained with 
their lives on the long Indian frontier, and hated all autho- 
rity that savoured of Anglicanism or aristocracy with a 
fervent hatred. They had little love and slight regard for 
the Virginian country gentlemen and Eastern Pennsylvania 
Quakers, who legislated for the provinces, along whose 



THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 123 

western frontiers, fortunately for the other, their stockaded 
villages so thickly clustered. Presbyterians and fierce Pro- 
testants, they were admirable and in a sense God-fearing, 
nay even law-abiding people, if the seeming paradox is 
admissible. But the laws must be interpreted by their 
own narrow public opinion, which was no bad one where 
they were thick enough upon the ground, but it did not 
include the faintest sense of justice towards an Indian, 
while a royal Governor, with his little corps of placemen, 
would have had a hopeless prospect. Nor are the foregoing 
remarks by any means parenthetical. For by some writers 
the dream has been indulged in that this great western 
country might have been included in Canada by greater 
military activity in the war or more diplomatic firmness at 
the peace. It does not matter that every effort was made 
to hold it in the former, and in the latter that Great Britain 
was in no position to be firm. The dream, in any case, is 
an idle one. It was inevitable that Canada should be 
reduced to her natural limits behind the Lakes, and fortu- 
nate for her was it that her Great North-West was still 
outside the politician's survey or the restless settler's 
vision. 

It was still an anxious time in Canada. One or two bad 
harvests, even with the vastly improved agriculture of the 
colony, produced a scarcity, for a numerous soldiery had 
to be fed, and the western posts with their increased 
garrisons all looked to the province for their supplies. 
These last, too, had to be carried laboriously round the long 
portages of the St. Lawrence, including that of Niagara, 
though Haldimand eased the situation somewhat by the 
beginnings of that canal system which in after years was to 
become such a feature of Canadian transportation. In- 
dividuals travelled by canoe, goods were shipped in bateaux 
some twenty feet long, flat-bottomed and tilted fore and 
aft, which were dragged empty up the edges of the rapids 
while the freight was carried along the densely wooded 
shore. Haldimand also founded a library in Quebec, com- 



i2 4 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

missioning Richard Cumberland, the poet, to purchase the 
volumes, which still exists in a famous institution. 1 The 
officers at Quebec, too, were now on better terms with the 
merchants, as we find them giving joint balls and enter- 
tainments, in one of which the indefatigable Quebeckers 
danced the clock round. A play of Moliere's, and many- 
less ambitious pieces, were acted. Haldimand gave quite 
brilliant balls at the Chateau, though Baroness Riedesel, 
who saw him almost daily for many weeks and had an 
immense admiration for his character, describes his private 
life as very quiet and gardening as the passion of his 
leisure hours. He was strongly of the opinion that the 
Quebec Act was the right policy. Ministers and politicians 
in England and elsewhere might expend themselves in floods 
of oratory and sheets of print upon the subject, but the 
simple fact remained that the Act alone, with Carleton's 
help, had saved Canada, which seemed to the practical Swiss 
veteran fairly conclusive evidence in its favour. Madame 
Riedesel, who was here with her children during her husband's 
detention as one of Burgoyne's ' Convention prisoners ' in 
the south, also met Brant, the famous Indian chief, at 
Haldimand's table, and found him a man of polished 
manners and conversation, having been partly educated in 
England. She used to have her dinner and wine sent to 
her at the Ursuline convent, and though the strictest of the 
three great sisterhoods of Quebec, the Baroness tells us the 
nuns grew so merry in her company that they would dress 
up and execute a kind of Cossack dance for her amusement. 
She tells us of the long red-hooded cloaks, exchanged in 
summer for silk ones, worn by the women of the noblesse, 
and their woollen caps decorated with coloured ribbons, a 
mark of their rank, and how they would tear such a cap off 
the head of any woman of lower degree they found pre- 
suming to wear one. Montreal, we are told, drowned its 
anxieties in an even more continuous round of gaieties than 
the senior and rival city, and an officer of Butler's Rangers 

1 The Literary and Historical Society of Quebec. 



THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 125 

declared that only a snowshoe run round the mountain 
every day enabled him to keep in condition. As regards 
Quebec, at any rate, it may be doubted if any place in 
Britain's oversea possessions past or present, having regard 
to its size, can boast of such a picturesque social history 
as this gay little city, from the middle of the seventeenth 
to the middle of the nineteenth centuries, when the British 
garrisons were finally withdrawn. 

In 1779 began that long and curious flirtation on the part 
of Vermont with the British authorities in Canada. An old 
dispute concerning territory between New Hampshire and 
New York had culminated in 1779 by the hardy settlers 
of that part of the former known as the Hampshire grants, 
otherwise Vermont, proclaiming themselves an independent 
State within the Confederacy and so free from New York 
interference. This put a frontier self-constituted province 
of the New Federation, which declined for a long time to 
recognise it as such, in a position to threaten the American 
Government with the obvious alternative, and by secret 
though only half-sincere negotiations with the Government 
at Whitehall and Quebec, to keep a back door open for a 
return to the British flag. We left Ethan Allen in Dart- 
mouth Castle after his attempt on Montreal in 1775. He 
now appears with his brother Ira in the light of a semi- 
repentant rebel representing a majority in a wavering 
province, while the Governor of the Green Mountain country 
at the same time writes to Washington that if the rights of 
Vermont, which has earned his gratitude by her valour in 
the cause as well as by her severe treatment of Tories with 
1 confiscation, banishment, imprisonment, and hanging,' is 
not going to be duly recognised, it was high time for her 
seriously to consider what she was fighting for. Congress 
paid no attention to this, whereupon the Vermont pro- 
vincial government appointed Ira Allen and another to 
open communications with Haldimand ' on general matters.' 
There is no occasion to follow the extremely tortuous and 
non-committal advances of the Vermonters, which were 



126 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

met by Haldimand with caution accompanied by distrust 
of and some contempt for the emissaries. But the attach- 
ment of Vermont, which could put four or five thousand 
admirable irregulars and hardy men into the field, was too 
good a prospect to forgo any chance of realising. Infinite 
mystery was observed by the Vermonters, and enjoined on 
Haldimand's emissaries. Allen writes to Congress, however, 
that they had a right to cease hostilities with Great Britain, 
and that he was as resolutely determined to defend the 
Independence of Vermont as was Congress that of the 
United States. The immediate upshot of all this was a 
tacit truce on that part of the frontier. In October Colonel 
St. Leger was sent with one thousand men to Crown Point 
to await events in Vermont, while a force of Green Mountain 
men, to allay suspicion, was stationed on their own side of 
the lake. The subalterns, however, not being in the secret, 
a skirmish resulted, after which St. Leger, to the surprise 
of the rank and file, returned his prisoners with apologies. 
But in November 1781 the staggering news arrived of the 
surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, and for the moment 
put an end to all these amenities. They were soon however 
revived, the Vermont cabal thinking that Congress in its 
now secure position would reject their claims. But as 
regards the Aliens and their friends it was a somewhat 
shady business, prompted by egotism, pique and selfish 
considerations generally, among which, however, was the 
venial one that Vermont's natural trade outlet at that time 
was towards the St. Lawrence. 

The disaster at Yorktown in October 178 1, in which the 
French took so conspicuous a part, caused grave misgivings 
to the Canadian Government. It was only human that a 
glow of rekindled national glory should flare in the breasts 
of the Canadians at so decisive a triumph, so complete a 
revenge, achieved over conquerors, howsoever generous, at 
whose hands they had one and all met within easy memory 
such dire humiliation. But nothing happened of any 
moment, and there is no occasion to attempt an analysis 



THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 127 

here, though there is some data for doing so, of the private 
attitude of seignior, priest and peasant. It is enough that 
no temptation was offered them to give practical shape to 
any measure of unrest there may have been. We know- 
Washington's views as to Canada and his allies. No enemy 
appeared, and the suspension of hostilities which preceded 
the peace quickly followed, while Carleton, much against 
his inclination, was sent to New York as Commander-in- 
Chief. As a combatant officer at any time in the war, Sir 
Guy would have been invaluable. With the perversity 
which distinguished ministers and most of their servants 
throughout this hapless period, he was sent out now it was 
all over, on business extremely painful and difficult, with no 
prospect of glory or even of military activity. At Quebec 
he had fortuitously been the right man in the right place. 
This was altogether another kind of business, yet he was 
still the right man, and the Government knew it so well 
that they would not listen to his objections. Conciliation 
coupled with a frank recognition of independence was now 
the cue of the new Rockingham Ministry. Carleton, who had 
been for every possible measure of conciliation in the early 
days of the war, and had almost refused to treat the very 
men who fought against him as ordinary enemies, did not 
like this complete volte-face at the sword's point. The 
Americans, on their part, were a little uneasy at his advent. 
They had been thankful to see his back four years ago, but 
for quite different reasons. It was not his sword they had 
now any reason to fear but the bigness of his heart, which, 
from his treatment of their prisoners in Canada, had earned 
him much unforgotten gratitude. He was the only British 
general, too, whom they had not beaten. He was also the 
only one who had not harried them, for the opportunity to 
do so had not been his, and yet for him alone was in many 
quarters a kindly feeling and in all one of respect, and this 
was not for the moment quite convenient. Congress within 
sight of peace negotiations was stiffening its back for the 
encounter. There was an element even in the patriot party 



128 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

who might find ancient affections too strong for them before 
a King and Ministry in a mood approaching the apologetic 
and repentant. Congress wanted the last pound of flesh, 
and they did not altogether relish the presence during these 
negotiations of a commander who himself had established 
some claim on the more generous feelings of their people. 

They might have spared themselves, however, all anxiety. 
Carleton's business at New York, so far only as it con- 
cerns our story, was to see the swarms of refugee loyalists, 
civilians and military, with their women and children, safe out 
of the country. This generous and painful task he performed 
with that steadfast and unshakable thoroughness which 
distinguished most of his actions, and till he had completed 
it so far as lay within his power, Congress found him as 
hard to shift by importunities and threats as he had proved 
behind the ramparts of Quebec to stronger arguments. It 
is doubtful if any commander in the service would have 
done this delicate and painful task so well. While his heart 
went out to the misery and sufferings of the people under 
his protection, for whom the transport facilities were nothing 
like sufficient, his imperturbable coolness remained un- 
broken before the natural impatience of the Americans to 
see the back of the last redcoat on the quays of New York. 
Though the military saviour of Canada, and twice for long 
periods her Governor, the service he rendered in New York 
to the loyalists who were the second founders of the colony 
was scarcely less valuable. 

In a very different strain from the foolish Germain who 
had so materially helped to bring about the debacle, Town- 
shend now wrote to Carleton, ' All we can do is to indicate 
our objects and choose a fit man like yourself to carry them 
out' / 

He succeeded Clinton at New York in May 17^2. Besides 
the troops, regular and provincial, he found several thousand 
loyalists of both sexes and all ages within the lines, and the 
situation was one of tacit but armed and suspicious neut- 
rality. Charleston and Savannah, also in Carleton's com- 



THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 129 

mand, were the only other footholds in the united colonies 
now occupied by the British. They too, like New York, were 
crowded with loyalists, the victims of that banishment, con- 
fiscation and persecution decreed against every individual 
who by act, sympathy, or refusal to take the new act of alle- 
giance, had favoured the King. ' The banishment or death 
of over one hundred thousand of these most conservative 
and respectable Americans,' writes the most recent American 
chronicler of their fortunes, ' is a tragedy but rarely paralleled 
in the history of the world.' No modern American writer 
of repute any longer attempts to defend the harsh and too 
often brutal treatment of fellow-citizens whose only crime 
was a legitimate difference of opinion on the subject of certain 
political measures, or more often a difference merely as to 
the right method of encountering them. It can hardly be 
accounted unpardonable that there were men who honestly 
thought that a ' threepenny tea tax,' openly denounced by 
one of the great English parties, was not a sufficient cause 
to plunge the country into a war disastrous in any case and 
seemingly hopeless for the thirteen jarring and jealous colo- 
nies. But for Washington and the French, humanly speak- 
ing it would have been a hopeless struggle. No people were 
justified in expecting such an almost miraculous and timely 
intervention of Providence as Washington proved, while 
those ancient and bitter enemies the French were not in the 
reckoning. Besides motives, which at the time seemed so 
obviously sensible, those of conscience alone operated with 
great numbers, for the tie of allegiance was taken more 
seriously in those days than in these. The loyalist party 
contained a large proportion of persons of wealth, character 
and education, capable of judging for themselves in what 
was really a difficult and many-sided question; men less 
likely to be influenced by the floods of impassioned oratory 
to which the rank and file of America at that day as at this, 
for some inscrutable reason, are more susceptible than the 
English or Scotch. But as I have before remarked, there 
were many contributing causes to the revolutionary move- 

I 



130 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

ment that were as tinder to the spark struck by the definite 
grievance of the second foolish attempt to tax the colonies, 
or rather to test and rouse them by an admittedly trifling 
impost. The motives that drove or drifted men to one side 
or the other were mixed both in nature and quality. Prin- 
ciple, self-interest, expediency, fear, all found a numerous 
following. But it was much easier as a rule to shout with 
the patriot multitude than to face their wrath, which was 
manifested in truculent fashion almost from the very first, 
and upon the whole the consistent loyalist had to sustain 
his opinions with a more than average exhibition of 
courage. 

No apology is needed for this brief digression on his 
account, for he became the somewhat ill-mated partner of the 
French Canadian and the co-founder of the Canada we 
know to-day. At this moment, however, a more forlorn 
concourse of civilised beings have rarely collected together 
than were these potential makers of Empire. In every case 
deprived of their real and the greater part of their personal 
property, they practically depended on that charity of the 
British Government to which they had assuredly every 
right. Some twenty provincial regiments, however, reduced 
to about five thousand men, were on the active pay list, 
while numbers of widows and children were already in re- 
ceipt of militar}' pensions granted more or less on the scale of 
the British establishment. An armed neutrality in the mean- 
time was observed between the armies within and without 
New York. After the surrender of Cornwallis no fighting 
of much moment had occurred in the south. A few thousand 
loyalists, some from Boston when Howe evacuated it, others 
flying independently from the persecution of their various 
States, had already arrived in Canada and Nova Scotia, 
while some again of the highest class had repaired to 
England or the West Indies. But the great majority were 
huddled together behind the British works at the three coast 
cities which alone still flew the British flag — in very truth 
between the devil and the deep sea. Through the whole of 



THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 131 

1782 constant accessions were made to their numbers at 
New York. In July Charleston and in August Savannah 
were evacuated, many thousand Tory refugees being carried 
thence to Florida, the West Indies, or to Carleton's already 
crowded lines at New York. In August Carleton heard 
that complete Independence was to be ceded in the coming 
treaty, and he at once requested to be recalled. He had 
already been compelled to act as the mouthpiece for some- 
what humiliating and uncompromising submission though 
he himself had met with nothing but success, and this com- 
plete surrender ill suited the military pride and sense of 
honour of the veteran soldier. But the ministry would not, 
or to be precise could not, relieve him. So he set himself, 
as was his habit, to the distasteful task for which his firm- 
ness and humanity at once fitted him. When news of the 
impending treaty, and above all of its nature, reached New 
York, the hapless Tories were in despair. They had only 
one more drop to drain from their cup of bitterness, and 
that was the actual conclusion of the treaty early in the 
following year, 1783. They then knew the worst, and 
what that meant they were better able to appreciate than 
his Majesty's ministers. The latter, however, represented 
mainly in these negotiations by Lord Shelburne, the first 
Marquis of Lansdowne, and the King himself, were lacking 
neither in sympathy for their situation nor in efforts on their 
behalf. They had held out long and stoutly for such treat- 
ment of the loyalists as even in those days was expected of 
civilised humanity at the close of a civil war. The days of 
' Hell or Connaught ' were justly regarded as belonging to a 
cruder period of British civilisation, and for the American 
loyalist there was not even a Connaught offered them within 
the vast unsettled boundaries of their respective provinces. 
It was ' Hell or Halifax ' now, in the catch phrase of the day. 
The sentences of confiscation decreed in various forms early 
in the war by every one of the thirteen legislatures on 
combatant and non-combatant loyalists alike were practi- 
cally confirmed. Even the French protested, not so much 



132 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

it is said from philanthropic motives, though at that moment 
they could afford to indulge them, as from a desire to keep 
an important element in the country who would at the same 
time be under an obligation to France. For the French 
were ill-pleased with the Treaty, which had been passed as 
it were behind their backs, and held that their share in the 
business, which was in fact decisive, had been too lightly re- 
garded. One object in their military policy had been the 
capture of the American trade, a prospect which the early 
termination of the war and the somewhat unexpected nature 
of the amenities which distinguished the Anglo-American 
overtures considerably dimmed. The loyalists, therefore, 
reinstated by their means, might be fairly expected to exert 
a favourable influence. But neither English nor French 
diplomatists could move the Americans in this matter. 
Congress with some truth made the reply so familiar to-day 
in certain American complications, that they had no power 
to bind the several States. The limited concession was ' a 
promise to earnestly recommend ' lenity towards the Tories 
to the various provincial governments, to suggest also that 
those who had taken up arms should be permitted to buy 
back their estates at the price they had been disposed of, 
and that those of non-combatant Tories should be restored. 
That no hindrance should be offered to any persons return- 
ing to the country for the settlement of their affairs or the 
collection of their debts. This was of course useless, and 
known to be so by Franklin, Jay and Laurens, the American 
commissioners : above all in those days, when the intense 
sectional particularism of the provinces had, in spite of a 
successful war, given way but little. The ruined Tories in 
their despair said many hard things of the British Govern- 
ment. But the latter were virtually helpless. They had 
nothing wherewith to support their protests ; for the nation 
would not support a continuation of the war, the only 
argument that was left to them. 

If the rigour exercised against the ' sons of despotism ' or 
the Tories, as they were usually called, had not developed 



THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 133 

till later in the war when they and the patriots had drawn 
each others' blood and often plundered each others' property, 
it would be more conceivable. But these acts and laws, 
making the lives of those who dissented even negatively 
from armed resistance a burden to them, were passed in 
many States as early as 1775, and in most but a year later. 
The schedule of these laws in each State, with their addi- 
tions from year to year throughout the war, are instructive 
reading. The thoroughness with which they were carried 
out in a physical sense, with the utter looseness of the 
machinery and the quality of the adjudicators, is still more 
so. ' We have many unhappy devils to take their trials for 
their life,' writes a North Carolinian Whig to his Governor — 
' an exasperated jury and a lay judge. My God ! what may 
we not expect' Measures differed somewhat in the various 
provinces, but in no very material details. The culprits 
were usually rated in three or four classes. There were 
those who merely sympathised with the Crown and refused 
the oath to Congress, with many who were only suspected 
of such sympathy. There were great numbers, again, who 
had sworn allegiance to the Crown in the cities or districts 
occupied by British troops, whose protests of undue influence 
were interpreted by their Whig neighbours after their own 
fashion, which under the heat and passions of the hour had 
become almost totally devoid of any judicial qualities. 
Lastly, there were the men actually enrolled in the numerous 
loyalist corps, who could look for no mercy and found none. 
Property was confiscated very early. The idea of providing 
the sinews of war from the estates of those who objected to 
support it was a practical and popular one with most of the 
colonial governments. Even thus, however, by the time 
the machinery for carrying out their plan was in motion, 
they found that private individuals had forestalled them to 
quite a serious extent. The grabbing of Tory property by 
patriot neighbours had gone merrily on before their govern- 
ments stepped in to seize the spoils in more reputable and 
orthodox fashion. Non-combatant Tories were mulcted 



134 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

in heavy fines, and if not able to pay, their property was 
sold remorselessly for what it would fetch. The families 
of those who had gone abroad to escape the turmoil were 
compelled to hire soldier substitutes. A Tory, everywhere 
using the word in its most comprehensive sense, had no 
rights. If an ordinary thief under trial swore that he had 
sinned under the belief that the purloined article belonged 
to a neighbour of this detested class, such a plea was held 
valid. Families of wealth and refinement, while still resident 
in their houses, were stripped of everything they possessed 
but a few necessary chairs and cooking utensils, while 
the mob, who on such occasions are always worse than the 
men at the front, took every liberty. The militia treated 
the property of Tories as contraband of war. So many of 
the latter belonging to what were known as 'the first 
families,' class jealousy added further fuel among the vulgar 
to passions that needed no fanning. And in colonial times 
persons were openly listed and designated as gentlemen or 
esquire, farmers, yeomen and so forth, distinctions which 
from the Revolution onward have been discreetly relegated 
to private conversation for many and obvious reasons. The 
Revolution not only gave independence to the American 
colonies, but it greatly democratised them. Even New 
England could look back on vanished aristocratic tend- 
encies they had never suspected at the time. But the 
others had practically been ruled by the propertied classes, 
the merchants, gentry, and substantial yeomen. The 
franchise in all had been restricted ; the small farmers, 
labourers, servants, foreign settlers and backwoodsmen had 
little voice in public affairs. These people, however, came to 
the surface in the Revolution, helped much in the shouting 
and mobbing as well as in the fighting. Samuel Adams, 
Tom Paine and the cant of the day generally cheered them 
on. In the temporary governments and committees of the 
various provinces men found seats who hitherto had no 
recognition. The higher element of the very large pro- 
pertied class — the aristocracy, to use a convenient term — 



THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 135 

were not depleted by the loyalist emigration, but they were 
greatly weakened. Their legal privileges were swept away 
by enlarged franchises and a successful democratic challenge 
of the pre-eminence they had by tacit consent enjoyed. 
There was no subversion, but in future they had to share 
their power with a new class, and outside the thresholds 
of social life to profess even in Virginia that one man was 
as good as another. Never again even in the middle and 
southern States was the word ' gentleman ' used in public / 
to designate a class. It became in future a mere foolish 
and illogical term for the male of the human species other- 
wise than black. Washington, who certainly wrote on one 
occasion that the best thing a Tory could do was to commit 
suicide, nevertheless deplored the licence and cruelty which 
were being practised towards them, and issued orders to his 
troops to that effect which were ill obeyed beyond the 
reach of his eye. They, he considered, had only as much 
or as little cause of complaint against a Tory as the British 
Government had against any supporters of Congress that 
should come into their power. The practice of wholesale 
confiscation, of robbing and hounding non-combatants and 
persecuting women and children, he held to be not only 
wrong in itself but dangerous, as likely to create reprisals. 
But Washington's hands were full of other matters, and he 
had no concern with these either during or after the war. 
The strength of the great middle element of the population, 
between Tories and patriots probably a majority, who 
awaited indifferently the tide of events, and were ready 
to yield to slight pressure from either side, no one has 
ventured to estimate. The avowed loyalists, men who in 
deed or spirit were prepared to answer the appeal of the 
King to assist in the repression of what, after all, was 
rebellion pure and simple, got a late start. They were as a 
rule awkwardly situated. It was much easier for the other 
side, with their local organisation and the lower rabble 
generally on their side, to take the initiative. The Tory had 
to seek out the distant military camps, and abandon his 



136 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

home and perhaps his family to men whose intentions 
became quite easily unmistakable. New York and Long 
Island having been British ground early in the war, had 
gradually accumulated, as I have already said, the greater 
part of these unfortunates. In the days of that over-con- 
fident and supercilious failure, Howe, it was declared that 
inadequate facilities were given for the raising of Royalist 
regiments. He had despised the help as much as the 
opposition of colonial soldiers. The one perhaps was a 
corollary of the other. Yet more, he was cold and un- 
gracious to the refugees, and his officers, it was affirmed, 
followed suit; and this was the brother of the man who, 
before his untimely death at Ticonderoga twenty years 
before, had made himself conspicuous for every opposite 
quality. Sir Henry Clinton, his successor, was ' cut to the 
heart ' by the sufferings and the lamentable state of these 
suffering people. When Carleton came their numbers had 
increased and were daily increasing, and their circumstances 
were not only more immediately distressing but were now 
without hope of recovery in their own country. Hitherto 
they had been buoyed up with hopes of a good time coming 
when they would recover their own and perhaps something 
more than their own in return for their sufferings. In 
the constant presence of a powerful British force and the 
mutual encouragement of a large sympathetic body of fellow- 
sufferers, that hope had been fed with too much doubtful 
fuel. Every favourable item was exaggerated, and Riving- 
toris Gazette, run in the loyalist interest, battened on fancy 
rather than on fact. So the terms of the treaty came as a 
frightful shock. The scramble to get away by sea and the 
scuffle to get within the lines from the inland districts grew 
frantic. The latter was swelled at the last by many who 
had tested in person the recommendation by Congress to 
the States on their behalf and found it wholly futile. It 
must be remembered that the measure originally dealt out 
to the loyalists had been meted out by them in turn when 
opportunity had placed their persecutors within their power. 



THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 137 

It was only natural, but it did not tend to improve their 
mutual relations. In some districts the war had meant a 
ruthless civil strife. This was particularly the case in 
South Carolina, where the Anglo-Saxon even by then had 
acquired the more heated passions that still mark the 
people of the Southern States, and perhaps it is character- 
istic that the only State which in a modified but belated and 
almost useless form ultimately held out the olive branch to 
the banished Tories was that hot-headed one that set the 
spark to a far more sanguinary war eighty years later. 

Thanks to Maurice Morgan, Carleton's indefatigable 
secretary, some forty stout volumes filled with the MS. 
correspondence and accounts of those eighteen months 
of 1782-3 remain to us on the shelves of the Royal Institu- 
tion. It is a harrowing record. Here are petitions from 
the body of loyalists collectively, urging some better 
guarantee for their lives and property should they attempt 
to return than the treaty gives them ; there innumerable 
others for pensions from the widows and families of men 
who had died in the service of the Crown and depicting 
the forlorn condition of the survivors. Here too are 
Carleton's own letters describing the pitiful scenes he had 
to witness and the painful stories he had to hear. He had 
plenty of provision, however, and no lack of money. The 
Crown was generous for all present needs, and as regards 
future provision in deserving cases upon the modest scale 
incumbent on the disbursers of public money, and Carleton 
within such limits had practically carte blanche. We have 
the lists too of the loyalist regiments on the strength, their 
rates of pay and pension ; and it may be noted as curious 
that the custom of purchasing commissions was prevalent 
even among these irregular corps. Hundreds of negroes 
again of both sexes were congregated at New York, some 
the property of refugees, some the spoils of war, others run- 
away slaves. Each one is described by name, sex, age, 
and physical qualities, with owner's name and home where 
possible. The deportation of American property was 



138 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

especially provided against in the treaty, unless paid for 
under valuation, and this negro problem was complicated 
to a degree. But with this and the vexed question of the 
release and exchange of prisoners and many others that 
fell on Carleton we have nothing to do here. It is due, 
however, to the memory of a man so much concerned 
with Canada, to note that the ministry in begging him to 
see the business through had declared that there was not 
a man on either side of the Atlantic in whom the Govern- 
ment had so much confidence. The American colonies 
that remained to Britain had long been looked to as the 
only solution of the loyalist problem — Canada, Nova 
Scotia, Florida, and the West Indies. The two latter for 
reasons of climate proved unsatisfactory, for considerable 
shipments to all had already been made. Tropical countries 
were ill-suited to men with little or no means, even to such 
refugees from the planting colonies as sailed thence from 
Charleston or Savannah. Many of the better sort, with in 
most cases enough saved from the wreck to subsist on, had 
fled to England. How they fared we may gather from the 
letters of ex-Governor Hutchinson, Curwen, and others. 
They were characteristically chilled at the indifference with 
which they were regarded by the great world which amused 
itself, eat and drank, went on its way, to their surprise, as 
if no Empire was at stake. They were shocked to find one 
party in the country rejoicing in the defeat of their own 
armies. They writhed, on the other hand, at the con- 
temptuous way in which the Americans were spoken of, 
and encountered at every turn that curious insular super- 
ciliousness towards the ' colonist ' aggravated by a blank 
mind towards his colony, for which the most colonising of 
nations has always been and is still distinguished. Within 
a month of the receipt of the news that the preliminaries 
of the treaty of peace had been signed, 5600 loyalists sailed 
for Nova Scotia. Many of these, wrote Carleton to 
Governor Parr of that province, ' are of the first families and 
born to the fairest possessions, and I beg therefore that 



THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 139 

you will have them properly considered.' By the terms of 
the treaty the British were to evacuate New York with as 
much despatch as possible. Nothing was said about the 
loyalists, but Carleton, to his honour, determined to inter- 
pret the clause this way. Through the spring, summer 
and autumn of 1783 the melancholy and difficult task of 
shipping the exiles with such poor effects as they had 
managed to save from the general wreck went forward. 
The insufficient supply of vessels made the task a slow 
one. The American authorities contended that the trans- 
portation of the loyalists was not in the agreement, and 
continually importuned Carleton to name an early day 
for the evacuation of the city. He replied firmly but 
courteously that he differed from them in his interpretation 
of the treaty, that he was as anxious as they were for the 
evacuation, but it was simply a matter of ships not of will, 
and he was privately determined that not a soldier should 
move till the last loyalist who claimed his protection had 
embarked. The pressure of the Americans increased and 
Carleton's replies got shorter, till at length the last batch 
of the melancholy band, which had been estimated at 
27,000, were safe on board. Then came the turn of the 
army, and it was near the end of November before the 
last British drum beat on the Battery at New York and 
the last redcoat filed into the boats. ' His Majesty's 
troops,' ran Carleton's last despatch on board the Ceres, 
'and such remaining loyalists as chose to emigrate, were 
successfully withdrawn on the 25th! inst. from the city of 
New York in good order, and embarked without the smallest 
circumstance of irregularity or misbehaviour of any kind.' 



140 THE MAKING OF CANADA 



CHAPTER VII 

THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 

It will hardly be supposed that the inability of the British 
Government to enforce the restoration of the loyalists to 
their homes and properties was allowed to pass by the 
opposition in Parliament without criticism. On the 
contrary the clamour was loud and the ministry were 
assailed in bitter and scathing terms. The opportunity 
was too good a one for party purposes to let slip, and the 
heroics which leaped to men's lips one might say were 
ready-made. So was Shelburne's answer, that the only 
alternative was the continuation of the war, a course 
which the country at large was unflinchingly opposed to. 
Furthermore, the restoration of the loyalists to estates long 
sold and subdivided would have been difficult, and) in the 
temper of the Americans would have been in any case a 
most dubious experiment, while money compensation was 
out of the question, as Congress could not even pay the 
troops who had fought its battles. It was the attitude of 
the Americans, who refused the olive branch in any shape 
or form, that was the crime, and it was dearly paid for in 
after years. Nor is it the place here to tell of men like 
Alexander Hamilton, Washington himself, and even Patrick 
Henry, with thousands of others, who were ashamed of the 
business and would have had it otherwise. The former as 
a lawyer and with deliberate purpose took up the case 
of a rich Tory against a poor widow as a courageous but 
unpopular display of his principles. The demagogue 
Henry expended futile eloquence in the quasi-aristocratic 



THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 141 

Assembly of Virginia in behalf of Tory creditors, and his 
speeches are instructive reading. But these men were as 
voices crying in the wilderness, and the loyalists who tried 
the experiment of repatriation were boycotted, imprisoned 
or banished. Only a few of the obscurer sort contrived to 
slip back and survive unnoticed in the larger towns till 
men's passions had cooled, which in this case was a slow 
and tedious process. It only remained for the British 
Government to compensate so far as they were able those 
who had suffered so grievously on their behalf, and this, as 
we know, they had already taken steps to accomplish. 
Free grants of wild land in the still British provinces to be 
sure cost them nothing, but free transportation, implements 
and provisions for two years were supplied, while all the 
officers of the colonial corps and many who had held civil 
appointments, as well as the widows of those who had 
fallen, were pensioned. A further grant, which amounted 
eventually to nearly three and a half millions, was allotted 
in compensation for losses of all kinds, including confisca- 
tion. The difficulties of testing the genuineness of claims, 
the delay from the number of applicants and necessary 
witnesses, with the remoteness of the property at issue, 
dragged on the work of the Commission, which sat in 
London and elsewhere, for many years. 

It is with Canadian settlement alone, however, that we 
are here concerned, and the landing of the refugees in 
their thousands on these then inhospitable shores, little as 
the average Englishman knows of it, is among the most 
tragic and dramatic incidents in our Imperial history. 
Famous poets have sung in melodious but inaccurate 
numbers of the expulsion of the Acadians and the burning 
out of the Wyoming settlers, but these were mere trifles in 
scale compared with the fate of the infinitely greater number 
of American Tories and the greater sensibility of so large a 
fraction of them. Ruined and banished almost to a man, in- 
sulted, tarred and feathered : half-hanged, occasionally wholly 
hanged : flung by droves into prisons always foul, sometimes 



142 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

noisome dungeons deep under ground like the Senna mine, 
their lot was pitiful indeed. As refugees again in the 
British lines were delicately-nurtured women and children, 
exposed to a makeshift, often ill-nourished life, to be 
ultimately dumped out upon the shores, whether of Lake 
Ontario or of the Atlantic, in either case at that time a 
forbidding wilderness. One can sympathise with the heart- 
sinkings that found expression in the letters still preserved 
from some of them as over the chill autumn seas, huddled in 
small ships, they pitched and rolled along the cruel iron- 
bound coast of southern Nova Scotia. The old Acadia 
contains great areas of fine land, but the noble harbour of 
Halifax, with its rocky shores, its indented high-pitched 
mainland, bristling then with its interminable mantle of 
pine forest, must have chilled the heart of men and women 
from the fat well-tilled levels of the Jerseys and eastern 
Pennsylvania, from the snug brick mansions and warm 
open undulations and oak forests of easy-going Virginia, 
from the homely fields of King's and Queen's and Orange 
counties where New York loyalty had chiefly flourished. 
In all, nearly 30,000 refugees landed in Nova Scotia, some 
crossing the strait to Cape Breton, a few going to Prince 
Edward Island, already sparsely settled, and about 9000 to 
the St. John River and the district which soon afterwards 
became the province of New Brunswick. The population 
of this whole country after seventy years of British owner- 
ship had only reached a total of about 14,000, including 
perhaps a thousand of the old French Acadians, who it may 
be here stated neither then, nor ever, had the slightest con- 
nection with their fellow-countrymen in Canada. While 
the origin of the latter is known with almost minute 
precision, that of the Acadians has apparently baffled 
investigation. Their dialect and their character is some- 
thing different from that of the others, a fact due no doubt 
to the isolation and independence of their earlier history. 
Unlike the Canadians, they were neither coddled nor 
tyrannised over by a paternal government. They had 



THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 143 

lived on the smooth and fertile northern bays of Acadia 
till the great uprooting of 1755 almost as the descendants 
of a long-forgotten shipwrecked company on some pleasant 
island in untravelled seas might have lived, save for a 
little priestly intervention and shepherding. Nor again did 
they clear the forest like all other settlers on the North 
American seaboard, but dyked out the ocean instead 
and reclaimed the great salt marshes in the Bay of Minas 
and elsewhere. The English government at Halifax 
across the province, with its sparse British population from 
the mother country and the New England provinces, largely 
fishermen, could hardly have affected the few hundred sur- 
vivors of the Acadian deportation and their increase. But 
it was in 1783 that the foundation of Nova Scotia as a great 
and important province to contribute more than its share 
of able men to the body politic of British North America 
was really laid. The * Blue nose,' as every one familiar 
with American ethnology is well aware, differs in certain 
marked but unimportant characteristics from an Ontario 
Canuck. On a less progressive plane and with roots more 
widely sundered, the divergence between the modern French 
Acadian from the Bay of Fundy and the habitant of the 
Richelieu valley should be quite an engaging study to the 
Gallic ethnologist, as both are seventeenth-century French- 
men turned loose to grow in a somewhat similar wilderness 
under different conditions. I do not propose to dwell at 
any length on the loyalist settlement of Nova Scotia and 
the future New Brunswick, for no racial nor serious political 
difficulties presented themselves. The building up of these 
provinces was a matter merely of sheer straightforward 
hard work. The people, though mixed in blood, were 
homogeneous in temperament and habit, the vast majority 
ardent loyalists, but at the same time used to colonial life 
in all its branches, legal, political, mercantile and agri- 
cultural, and in a mood, for the present at any rate, to 
support any reasonably sensible representative of the British 
Crown. 



H4 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

How the thirteen thousand British in possession, with 
their little government and Assembly, received this over- 
whelming incursion we may not pause to inquire. The 
former were certainly not strong in the talents, and must 
have been very poor, for the revenue was microscopic. It 
was not to be expected that so undistinguished a community 
would be anything but overwhelmed by such a flood of 
rather virile humanity, judges, advocates, professors, clergy- 
men, soldiers and men of affairs generally, that lodged for 
the moment in tents, log shanties and clapboard houses, 
with their energies temporarily paralysed by physical 
hardships and misfortunes. History does not say how the 
old colonists, whose leading men were anything but loyalists, 
fared. Even Judge Haliburton, the son of a loyalist, who 
lived reasonably near the time and has dealt so inimitably 
in Sam Slick with the humours of old Nova Scotia as well 
as with its history in a deplorably opposite fashion, does not 
paint this feature of a situation which he could have painted 
so well. It is notable that one rarely meets a genuine 
Nova Scotian who is not of U.E. blood and justly proud 
of it. The descendant of what might be called the pre- 
historic Anglo-Nova-Scotian stock seems little in evidence, 
and yet there were as many of them in the province before 
the Revolutionary war as there had been a century before 
of those Frenchmen who are the ancestors of nearly all 
French Canada. 1 

Halifax and the province as an appreciable unit in the 
British constellation was not yet forty years old. During the 
French wars its infant settlements had been sorely harassed 
by the fierce Micmac Indians egged on by the French at 
Louisburg. Among its small population too there were 
in 1783 the increase of nearly two thousand German and 
Swiss immigrants from Europe settled by the British Govern- 
ment at Lunenburg soon after the founding of Halifax. 

1 One conspicuous exception known to the writer is that of the Archibalds, 
of abiding prominence in the province, who came from Pennsylvania before 
the war. 



THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 145 

Throughout the Revolutionary war, sea-girt and remote, 
the sympathies of this handful were of slight consequence ; 
but Colonel Morse in his survey report of this date tells us 
that New Englanders were the prevailing element and held 
generally much the same opinions as their compatriots at 
home. The most sensational feature of the loyalist influx 
of 1782-3 was the founding of the town of Shelburne, which 
in a year or so contained a larger population (8000) than 
either Quebec or Montreal and then almost as suddenly 
collapsed, owing to the unsuitability of its site. Indeed 
many of the official preparations for settlement had been 
ill-advised and inadequate. Nor can one be surprised, in 
view of the unprecedented demands made upon the British 
and Provincial governments at so remote a situation. All the 
immigrants, however, were not officers, judges, and country 
gentlemen by any means, for a considerable element of 
worthless or useless people had been unavoidably included. 
Many of the disbanded soldiers too, as has so often been 
the case, proved incapable of settling down to laborious 
industry. But immigration schemes in the eighteenth and 
first half of the nineteenth century had one supreme advan- 
tage in the fact that an immigrant once planted could with 
difficulty get away again. If in the case of real undesirables 
this may have been a dubious advantage to the community, 
that large element, who are now readily encouraged by the 
widely circulated reports of other countries and modern 
facilities for travel to shift from place to place in search of 
an imaginary Utopia, had then no such temptations, and 
survived the early period of hardships and acclimatisation 
to their own advantage and yet more that of their children 
and the country of their adoption. The U.E. loyalists in 
Nova Scotia and New Brunswick as in Upper Canada, if 
in part ill-suited to the labour of hewing homes out of a 
forest wilderness, were as a whole and in other respects 
well qualified to make a country. The first two winters, 
when rations were served out not always abundantly or of 
the best, as one can imagine under the circumstances, were 

K 



146 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

terribly trying. Accounts both optimistic and very much 

the reverse went back to the States. Some said the 

country was fertile and the climate fine, others that they 

were wrapped in perpetual fog and that moss grew in the 

place of grass. The American Whigs, we are told, keenly 

relished the more despondent versions, and in allusion to 

the broken indented coastline of Nova Scotia, declared that 

it gave them the palsy even to look at it on the map. 

But though some went on to Canada the grumblers stayed 

nevertheless, scattering over what a better knowledge of 

the two provinces and the adjacent island of Prince Edward 

showed them were the most eligible districts ; life in time 

became for most of them once more tolerable and more 

than tolerable to their children. Those of experience and 

ability found congenial use for both in the many posts of 

trust, legal, official and otherwise, that a growing colony in 

those days was somewhat profuse in and reserved more 

jealously than now for the well-educated and the well-bred, 

if not always for the most capable. A moderate emigration 

from Great Britain assisted by the rapid increase natural 

to a healthy country and a wholesome life, combined to 

multiply the 50,000 inhabitants of Nova Scotia and Cape 

Breton by many times within a few decades. Halifax, an 

important naval station, waxed and prospered. Prince 

Edward Island, to-day completely covered with the farms 

and villages of 100,000 souls, even thus early attracted its 

hundreds and fell under the governorship of Fanning, a 

famous South Carolina loyalist. The nine thousand or so 

who had founded St. John and spread up the rich interval 

lands of the beautiful river of that name had not long to 

wait before they were deemed worthy to form a sister and 

rival state to Nova Scotia. The first council of New 

Brunswick in 1784 is significant of the quality of the settlers, 

including as it did two distinguished American judges; 

two colonels of colonial corps and men of former large 

estates, one of the Winslows, a colonel of regulars, Beverly 

Robinson, an old friend of Washington's and one of the 



THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 147 

largest landowners in New York, and Judge Saunders, of 
the well-known Virginia family and a bencher of the Inner 
Temple. Among the settlers on the St. John River were 
the Queen's Rangers, one of the most distinguished of the 
loyalist corps which had been captured with Cornwallis. 

And all this time the Canadas, which more directly con- 
cern us, had been receiving smaller but constant waves of 
refugees. The benevolent Haldimand had his hands full, 
and the good French priests had begun to look askance at 
such a horde of dangerous heretics on their borders. The 
exiles had come by every conceivable means and by many 
devious routes. The influx, as in Nova Scotia, had begun 
on a smaller scale quite early in the war, for several hundred 
had been collected about Sorel and Montreal under Haldi- 
mand's supervision before the year 1780. But at the close 
of the war and for some time afterwards they arrived in 
much greater numbers and in more organised fashion. 
There too the loyalist regiments were disbanded and, like 
those that went to Nova Scotia, were settled together; the 
field officers being allotted 5000 acres, the captains 3000, the 
subalterns 2000, and the rank and file 200, with further 
plots for their children as they came of age. These military 
groups were known as l Incorporated settlements,' the town- 
ships allotted to civilians as ' unincorporated.' About seven 
loyalist corps, besides several detachments of disbanded 
regulars, amounting with their women and children to nearly 
four thousand souls, were planted mainly on the present 
site of Kingston and along the shores of the Bay of Quinte 
on Lake Ontario. The early loyalist influx to Canada was 
not so large as that which settled the Maritime Provinces, 
not numbering in all probably, though no general muster was 
taken as in the other, more than twelve thousand souls. But 
whereas in the seaboard colonies the additions for the next 
few years were inconsiderable and no serious problems of 
government were created, the movement into the Canadas 
continued to flow steadily for many years. The banished 
or persecuted loyalist exile was succeeded by a stream of 



148 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

immigrants from the States, impelled northwards neither by 
violent methods nor passionate loyalty, but by a host of 
mixed motives. These are readily conceivable, when good 
land is being offered cheap alongside an older community 
in a condition of considerable financial and political con- 
fusion and dominated in many districts by factions that 
success had made a trifle arrogant and distasteful to the 
quite neutral soul. But these people, though contributing 
materially to the development of Canada and the upsetting 
of the arcadian French-Catholic prospect embodied in the 
Quebec Act, are not reckoned among the Pilgrim Fathers 
of English Canada, as we shall see. The latter, which may 
be approximately reckoned at twelve thousand, mostly 
came in at the close of the war, with a few additions 
who had made a vain attempt at repatriation, to encounter 
nothing but contumely and rigid laws of exclusion. A 
natural point of settlement was that attractive region, 
fertile, picturesque, well timbered and well watered, known 
soon afterwards and to-day as the Eastern Townships, 
lying in the southern part of Quebec and over against the 
lakes and highlands of the Vermont frontier. But the 
militant note was strong in the U.E. loyalist. ' His 
true spirit,' writes Haldimand, 'is to carry arms, and the 
Governor did not deem it well to place these fiery souls 
within sight of a community of hardy rifle-shooting farmers 
whom at the moment they execrated. So Ontario, at that 
time a shaggy wilderness whose fertility, though but experi- 
mentally tested, was not fully realised, was selected and 
portions surveyed for the main settlement. It was neces- 
sary, of course, to go outside the French seigniories, which 
reached, as we have shown, a little beyond Montreal, but 
had not stretched southwards to the future Eastern Town- 
ships. It was obvious that a New Jersey farmer would not 
become a ' vassal,' even in the mild form the term now 
signified, of a French or English seignior. Indeed a certain 
fear of the French laws and the notorious Quebec Act had 
deterred a great many refugees from setting their faces 



THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 149 

northward. It may be here remarked, too, that the late 
treaty of peace had defined the bounds of Canada within 
the same limits as now enclose it. The wilderness forts 
west and south of the Lakes were still occupied by British 
garrisons, in spite of the protests of the Americans, as 
some guarantee, though a futile one as it proved, for the 
proper treatment of the loyalists. 

The refugees, as I have said, came to Canada by many 
routes; a few by sea, to Montreal, but the majority by 
canoe and bateau up the laborious, rapid, broken water- 
ways, both the more noted ones such as Champlain and the 
Mohawk, and others trodden only by the Indian or the 
voyageur. Some are said to have even travelled the whole 
way on foot ; others again, from Pennsylvania and more 
remote North Carolina, to have laboured through the wood- 
land trails in two-horse waggons till they struck the height 
of land whence lake and stream carried them down on im- 
provised boats to the great Canadian Lakes. From the 
last-named province came, among others, the two sons of 
Flora Macdonald of Scottish Jacobite fame, who with their 
father, a Highland settler in North Carolina and a major in 
a royalist corps, had fought through the war. The new 
survey had begun at the edge of the French country on 
Lake St. Francis, near the mouth of the Ottawa, and ex- 
tended westward up the St. Lawrence for over a hundred 
miles to old Fort Frontenac or Cataraqui and the Bay of 
Quinte on Lake Ontario. Fate had reserved the first 
of these tracts, the present county of Glengarry, for 
much later comers, the Catholic M'Donnells. Cleared from 
their Scottish holdings before the inexorable sheep, em- 
bodied in a regiment which assisted in quelling the Irish 
rebellion of '98, these Highlanders, at the instigation and 
under the leadership of their priest, afterwards their bishop, 
came hither with their families over a thousand strong. 
Many times that number may be found in Glengarry to- 
day, flourishing farmers, still mainly Catholics and till quite 
recently speaking the ancient tongue. But that all came 



150 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

later. In 1784 Johnson's Royal New York Regiment with 
its first battalion, mostly Germans of the Mohawk valley, 
whose women and children had joined them, started to open 
the broad tract of westward settlement that was to develop 
ultimately into a great province, in the present county of 
Dundas. Jessup's Rangers, English-Americans of the same 
battalion, came next, while the King's Rangers, also English 
New-Yorkers, under James Rogers, were allotted lands at 
Frontenac. These corps had mainly operated from Canada 
and been recruited from the loyalists near the borders. 
Colonel James Rogers was a brother of Robert, the famous 
partisan of the Seven Years' War, and had commanded a 
detachment of those rangers who in that same struggle 
won for themselves and their leader an imperishable repu- 
tation for deeds of daring and endurance. Robert Rogers 
went after Pontiac's war as a half-pay major to England 
and to Court, where he attracted some attention, as he 
deserved to, and figured large in the windows of the London 
print-shops. His after career does not concern us. He 
fought, however, in Africa, and raised both the Queen's and 
the King's Rangers in the Revolutionary war. But his health, 
undermined by later indulgences and earlier hardships, was 
not equal to his spirit, and he had practically to give up 
active service, and died in England. His brother James, 
Colonel of the King's Rangers and founder of the Canadian 
family still numerous, had a Crown patent for 22,000 acres 
on the Vermont side of Lake Champlain, which he was busy 
developing when the war broke out. He at once espoused 
the royal side and fought through it, and his property, 
valued at from £30,000 to £40,000, went by confiscation. 

Here too was Major Van Alstine with a large and capable 
gathering of exiles from New York, and Colonel M'Donnell, 
with further parties of disbanded soldiers, which in the 
next year were reinforced by some companies of Hessians 
that had been detained in Lower Canada. Along the 
good wheatlands by the Richelieu too, and around the 
indented foot of Lake Champlain, numbers of other 



THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 151 

refugees, both German and English, soldiers and civilians, 
found homes. And away in the west the fertile levels and 
less rigorous climate of the Niagara peninsula had taken 
the fancy of Butler and his Rangers, those ogres of Revolu- 
tionary story-books who, from long garrison work at the 
edge of its still virgin forests, must have got a good scent 
of its value, for it was the cream of all the districts then 
open for settlement. Lonesome and remote enough in 
those days was this country lying within sound of the 
roar of the Falls, before American settlement had yet 
touched the southern shores of Ontario and Erie, now the 
site of so many flourishing cities, but then, like the northern 
coast, wrapped in sombre forest from Oswego to Detroit. 
But the Niagara shore had even then for nearly a century 
been periodically enlivened by the passage of the western 
trade back and forth over the long portage round the 
cataract. The St. Clair river too, at the remoter end of 
Lake Erie, was an object point for some few loyalists, and 
this, though far the most advanced of all, as will be remem- 
bered, had been an oasis of French settlement for three 
generations. Lastly, so far at least as concerns us here, 
came the loyalist refugees, as they may in a sense be called, 
of another colour. Not only had the harried estates of the 
Johnsons and their numerous German, English and Dutch 
dependants and loyalist neighbours on the Mohawk been 
confiscated, but the flourishing villages and orchards of the 
Six Nations had been levelled with the ground. The 
Indians, indeed, had been alarmed and not a little in- 
dignant when they found that a treaty of peace had been 
concluded without any regard whatever to their interests. 
They failed to understand how the King could surrender a 
country that did not belong to him, having in mind, that is 
to say, their own recognised territories. Some of them had 
done good service for the Crown, and the Mohawks had 
suffered much for it. There was not unnatural discontent 
among the Six Nations generally, a feeling which Schuyler, 
on behalf of the Americans, attempted to make some 



152 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

capital out of. La Fayette, whose enterprises in America 
were not always conspicuous for wisdom, repaired himself 
to the Indian country, and advised the tribes to let the fact 
'sink deep into their hearts that their old friends the 
French would soon be among them again.' He also 
placarded Canada to the same effect, and one feels tolerably 
sure that had Washington known of his young protege's 
superfluous activity in such an unwelcome direction, he 
would have called him to order in that emphatic language 
he is said to have had always at command. The upshot of 
this Indian question, however, so far as it concerns Canada, 
was the immigration of the Mohawks, with some others of the 
Six Nations in two bodies, to that country at the invitation 
of the Government. The greater part under the chief, Joseph 
Brant, who had led them in the late war, settled on the 
Grand River to the north of Lake Erie, the banks of which 
from its mouth to its source, covering over half a million 
acres of first-class land, were allotted them by the 
Crown. Here in a much more contracted area around the 
neighbourhood of Brantford, in the very heart of agricul- 
tural Ontario, their descendants may be seen to-day follow- 
ing with moderate success the trades of the country. The 
lesser portion settled in like manner on the Bay of Quinte, 
and thus was finally broken up that famous confederation, 
great in spirit and discipline if small in numbers, that had 
shattered most, and been held in dread by all the Indian 
nations from the Ottawa to the Mississippi ; that had been 
the nightmare of the French for much over a century, and 
from the earliest strifes of Europeans had been the third 
factor which both sides had always to take into account. 
Here then were ten or twelve thousand people, the west- 
ern wing, so to speak, of the first and genuine U.E. 
loyalists, those whose deeds or opinions had irrevocably 
stamped them as the partisans of the British connection, 
scattered along the fringe of the most formidable forests from 
the axemen and settlers' point of view, in eastern North 
America. To realise their situation the reader should look 



THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 153 

at the map, note the position of Kingston and Niagara, and 
bear in mind that Montreal was practically the limit of 
civilisation. He must remember too those innumerable 
facilities and inventions of modern times, which now so 
vastly ameliorate the lot of the frontier settler in a score of 
ways, were not then dreamed of. These people had been 
accustomed to think vaguely of Canada as a hyperborean 
region with an indifferent soil. Reliable reports had, it is 
true, corrected this, or the experiment should not have been 
tried, but the inherited traditions and time-honoured beliefs 
were still rife among the adventurers. Beneath the forests 
of Upper Canada lay a country as good as the best of New 
York, the Jerseys, or Pennsylvania, and far better than most 
of Maryland. Virginia, and North Carolina, even in their 
virgin prime, which by now was a very old story. But 
its forests were harder to subdue than had been the 
primitive woodlands of most of these other countries, 
and the winters of Canada, bearable enough under more 
developed conditions, had terrors for the ill-supplied pioneer 
that the well-fed, well-clad Montrealer of to-day on a snow- 
shoeing party, or the Ontario farmer driving his cutter over 
well-beaten roads, is apt to forget. There was no mercy in 
the Canadian bush from October to June, no scrap of com- 
fort for the old-time pioneer, no bite for horse or cow, nor 
any breadth of hay meadow, but a few patches made by 
the beaver, yet opened from which he could fill his barn. 
The raw stumps bristled thick and high over the clearing 
for a decade or two before they rotted. Nor were these 
mere soft pine-woods springing from smooth carpets of 
needles, nor yet again comparatively open forests of hard 
wood with light underbrush, as was much of the country to 
the southward. The Canadian bush of oak, maple, beech and 
hemlock stood on the good soils, with peculiar density, while 
the cedars with other underwood and debris in the swamps 
presented a hideous tangle. In summer the mosquitoes, 
and yet more torturing black flies, made life a burden even 
to the thickest skinned. After generations to be sure 



154 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

had this to face as they pressed further and further back, 
but these earlier pioneers were not all labouring men who 
had exchanged a somewhat hopeless prospect in old 
countries for a period of hardship with the certainty of an 
ultimate rise in life. They had nearly all left comfortable 
farms and homes, many luxurious ones, to begin life again. 
If companionship in adversity was some consolation, their 
very numbers in another sense aggravated the situation. 
Food and supplies were furnished by Government, and 
Haldimand, though in poor health, spared himself no exer- 
tions in the difficult task of ministering to the innumerable 
necessities of so great a number of almost destitute people. 
The officers to be sure had small pensions, not a very 
appreciable asset among so many thousands in such an 
emergency. The Court of Claims established in London 
had scarcely as yet begun to sit. In spite of Haldimand's 
endeavours food at times fell wofully short, while the pre- 
mature freezing-up of provision ships in the St. Lawrence 
caused much distress. In the following spring the settlers 
on the Bay of Quinte were on the verge of starvation. 
Men offered a thousand acres for a bushel of potatoes ! 
Hungry children devoured the young buds of the bass-wood 
tree, and eagerly plucked the first heads of rye and barley, 
while a beef bone was passed round from house to house to 
be boiled and reboiled. But at least the immigrants were 
not raw Europeans, a fact which made a world of differ- 
ence in facing their trials. They possessed for the most 
part the resourceful qualities of the colonial and a general 
familiarity with the ways of life, though these qualities were 
tested under unprecedentedly hard conditions. Nor had 
they the advantage of their Nova Scotian brethren in a 
settled government ready to hand. They were technically 
under French law, but outside the pale for the present of 
any machinery but such as they might for local purposes, 
when they had time to think of it, set up for themselves. 
Shelter from the weather, acquisition of supplies, of seed, 
wheat and potatoes, or of felling timber, was the sole 



THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 155 

immediate care whether of colonel or private, ex-judge or 
labourer. They were probably not yet aware that they 
were creating another difficult problem for Canada. And 
here for the moment we must leave them, the hopeful and 
the despondent, the satisfied and the discontented, for there 
is a profusion of correspondence extant amply proving, if 
proof were needed, in a community of human beings thus 
situated, that there were plenty of both sorts. One senti- 
ment at any rate remained to cheer their darkest hours. 
They were still under the British flag and beyond the reach 
of the people, once friends and neighbours, between whom 
and themselves the horrors of a most implacable civil war 
had raised a barrier of mutual hatred and exasperation that 
lingered among the exiles to the second and third gene- 
ration. Whether this added bitterness or helped to 
assuage the memory of their former homes and dignities 
and easy lives one may not say. It must be remem- 
bered, however, that the impecunious and factious state of 
the still unconsolidated Republic after the peace, the rise 
of new and blatant elements to the surface, was some 
measure of consolation to those it had expelled, for the 
ethics of charity and goodwill could not reasonably be 
looked for. The exuberant loyalty of their leaders stamped 
itself indelibly on the map of Canada. The fifteen children 
of George the Third were responsible for the names of 
fifteen adjoining townships, the six miles square which the 
Anglo-Canadians from that day to this have made the unit 
both of survey and local administration. When these were 
exhausted, other abundant relatives of that King whose 
obstinacy and deplorable choice of councillors had been the 
chief cause of all their woes, were duly honoured in like 
fashion. 

Haldimand's closing years of service were heavy ones, 
and he met his Council at the end of 1784 for the last 
time. He has been accused by an uncritical posterity of 
harsh and arbitrary imprisonments, and among other things 
of violating the Act of Habeas corpus. The absurdity of 



156 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

the latter needs no demonstration, as the Habeas corpus 
was not at that time on the Canadian code, and if it had 
been the critical period of a great war was not one in which 
to quibble over its suspension. With gaols full of prisoners 
of war frequently attempting their escape assisted by out- 
side sympathisers : with spies and emissaries from France 
and the other colonies going up and down the country, 
Haldimand in the whole course of his administration im- 
prisoned just nineteen persons, some of them for only a 
few days. A French Protestant trader, Du Calvet, who for 
his dealings with the enemy fell under Haldimand's dis- 
pleasure, pursued him with extraordinary malignity, follow- 
ing him back to England and suing him, though to his 
own undoing, in the English Courts. 

Domestic politics had been in abeyance under the long 
suspense of war and the excitement aroused by the advent 
of the loyalists. The victory of the Americans had 
naturally shaken the prestige of British arms among the 
Canadians, both those who looked to them for protection, 
and such as may have had other hopes. Vermont too, 
though silenced for the moment by the surrender of Corn- 
wallis, had renewed its intrigues with Canada in the person 
of the Aliens and their friends. It is altogether a curious 
passage in the history of the times. The dominant faction 
there were pervaded by a provincialism so absorbing that 
they were prepared to hoist the flag of either Government 
which would guarantee them autonomy, and Congress, in no 
very good humour with them, had shown as yet no inclina- 
tion to recognise their pretensions. 

Haldimand to his great relief took his departure in 
November 1784, and a more conscientious servant Great 
Britain never had. A tardy justice is now being rendered 
to his memory in Canada. On the more crowded pages of 
national history he is never likely to get his deserts. His 
work was of the underground vigilant kind. It is sometimes 
said, though with little truth, that nothing occurred in Canada 
during Haldimand's time. It has been better said by a writer 



THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 157 

on the period that nothing occurred because Haldimand 
took care that it should not occur. But both statements 
are metaphorical. For the coming of the loyalists took 
place in his time, the weightiest event in Canadian history, 
and a prodigiously important one in that of the United 
States. And the success of their settlement in Canada owes 
to its Swiss Governor what only an altogether too elaborate 
relation of detail for the reader's patience, or my space, could 
convey ; for there is documentary evidence enough to fill a 
volume. Haldimand shares with the numerous relatives of 
George the Third such kind of immortality as topography 
can ensure, which if prosaic is unshakable, a county in Ontario 
and a street in Quebec bearing his name. He added a wing 
to the Chateau St. Louis, the site of which is now occupied 
by that conspicuous pile, the Chateau Frontenac hotel, the 
far-seen and dominating lodestar which beckons insistently 
to every properly constituted tourist steaming up to Quebec. 
His country house above the Montmorency Falls gathered 
fresh fame by becoming in after years a frequent residence 
of her late Majesty's father, the Duke of Kent, who lived 
there for so long, and is now, like his other residence, a 
hotel. Most of the remaining seven years of his life Haldi- 
mand spent in London, going freely into society, dining, 
card-playing and attending levees, where the King always 
talked to him as a wise and valued servant. One is tempted 
to say so much as the indefatigable diarist continues his 
record, which becomes valuable now merely as the confes- 
sions of a wise old bachelor who knew everybody and has 
an opinion worth having about many current things and 
people. He died in his native Switzerland, but a tablet in 
Westminster Abbey inscribed in French to Sir Frederick 
Haldimand, Knight of the Bath, and briefly recounting the 
offices he held, testifies at least that his adopted country 
held him in some honour, at his death in 1791. 

' We must preserve Quebec even if we have to send out 
Carleton himself,' Shelburne had written in a moment of 
anxiety and with scant courtesy to Haldimand. Though 



158 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

no such urgency as this suggests was present on the latter's 
retirement, Carleton was in fact appointed, and one might 
add persuaded, to succeed him. But this did not happen for 
nearly two years, critical in a civil sense as the state of 
Canada under its rapidly changing conditions had become. 
The country in the meantime was under the care of a 
Lieutenant-Governor. Cramahe had recently retired, and 
Hamilton, as a reward for his activity in frontier wars and 
his sufferings after Vincennes and at the hands of his Virginian 
gaolers, was already in his place. An energetic soldier, 
popular both with his men and the Indians, Hamilton as a 
politician seems to have been incautious and tactless ; a 
breezy advocate of premature reforms in a country whose 
unique conditions required the most careful handling and 
were yet to tax the wits of many much wiser men. He was 
in a short time, however, recalled, and Hope installed as his 
successor. The venerable Bishop Briand also retired about 
the same time before his increasing infirmities, after playing 
an honourable and useful part during critical times, and 
M. Hubert, a native Canadian, but adequate to the post, and 
comparatively young, became the next Bishop of Quebec. 
There had been some difficulty since the conquest in the 
supply of priests, not so much as to numbers as to qualifica- 
tions for the higher posts. The parish clergy, though almost 
absolute among their illiterate flocks, were no doubt for that 
very reason in a condition of some mental stagnation them- 
selves. It had been found necessary to forbid the country 
to French ecclesiastics on account of their irrepressible 
tendency to promote dissatisfaction, while the importation 
experiments from other Catholic countries had not been a 
success. The western posts still held by British garrisons 
remained too a source of no small anxiety, as the irritation 
of the Americans at their retention was extreme, while the 
continuous flow of loyalists into Canada, as evidence of their 
treatment at home, was a standing justification in the eyes 
of the British Government for their action. 

Carleton, now created Lord Dorchester, arrived at Quebec 



THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 159 

in October 1786 for his second term of government. He 
had been appointed, though not without resistance on his 
own part on the plea of advancing years, during the previous 
winter. Everything within and without the borders of 
Canada pointed to coming difficulties. France was ripening 
for the Revolution. One of the rival parties in the United 
States was in the worst ill-humour with Great Britain. 
Canada herself was altogether outgrowing the Quebec Act, 
assuming features that had never been contemplated, and 
presenting a fresh and perplexing problem to British states- 
manship. Carleton, or Dorchester as he now becomes, was 
regarded everywhere as the one man to fill the breach, and 
following a strong sense of patriotism rather than inclination, 
he left his country home in Hampshire and sailed for the 
St. Lawrence. It goes without saying that the people of 
Quebec, particularly the French, were glad to see their old 
friend and defender, and the warm addresses of welcome 
which greeted him were something more than the usual 
forms. After nearly a decade of bachelor regime at the 
Chateau, varied by that of Lieutenant-Governors not 
sufficiently endowed for social enterprise, the advent of 
Lady Maria, the mother now of a numerous and already 
fighting family of sons, was in a social sense equally accept- 
able. Dorchester came out with wider powers than any of 
his predecessors. He was not only the ruler of Canada, but 
had chief authority when called upon to exercise it over 
Nova Scotia, Cape Breton (not for some time reunited to 
the main province), New Brunswick and Prince Edward 
Island, all now under Lieutenant-Governors. He was also 
Commander-in-Chief of all the forces in British North 
America. He brought out with him his own Chief-Justice, 
William Smith, son of a New York judge, and himself 
formerly Chief-Justice of that important province. Taking 
the loyalist side, he had retired to England with Carleton, 
who held him in great respect. Both of them, together with 
Haldimand, had been much in consultation with Lord Sidney, 
now Secretary for the Colonies, as to the future administra- 



160 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

tion of Canada. The Quebec Act had theoretically settled 
the legal code, but Dorchester found himself once again 
confronted with something like the old confusion. English 
litigants in matters not pertaining to land frequently- 
rejected the French code, which was a mixture of the old 
French and Roman law, with much that custom alone had 
improved and sanctioned. The English lawyers often found 
its intricacies too difficult for them, and so it came about 
that while French judges followed French law, and English 
judges English law, precisely as they chose, to the great 
confusion of litigation, Chief-Justice Smith showed a predilec- 
tion at once for a loose interpretation of the Quebec Act in 
the courts and a reversion towards the royal proclamation 
of 1763. The confusion became so great that one of 
Dorchester's first acts was to get a committee appointed 
to inquire into and report upon the matter. Committees 
were also nominated to report on the commerce, the police, 
and the education of the province. The former was mainly 
represented by Montreal and Quebec, neither of them even 
yet with quite eight thousand inhabitants. Their merchants 
being mainly British, formally complained of the great irregu- 
larities in the legal situation which Dorchester's committee 
strongly recommended to his ' most serious consideration.' 
Trial by jury in civil cases was now optional with litigants. 
Smith brought a bill before the council for establishing it 
in all civil affairs, which was rejected. Attorney-General 
Monk made a speech of six hours, which exposed such a 
chaotic state of justice as to ' astonish the whole audience.' 
Dorchester then appointed a fresh committee under Chief- 
Justice Smith to investigate the past administration of the 
laws as well as the conduct of the judges in the courts both 
of Appeal and Common Pleas. Every prominent person 
was examined, and such a state of anarchy and confusion 
was exposed, says a contemporary legal writer, as no other 
British province ever before experienced. ' English judges 
following English, French judges French law, and worse still, 
some following no particular laws of any kind whatsoever.' 



THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 161 

The committee on schools and education and the feasi- 
bility of founding a university, produced like the others 
no immediate result, on account of those increasing changes 
in the balance of race which turned men's minds towards 
a division of the province. It produced, however, an 
instructive passage of arms between Hubert the new 
Bishop of Quebec and his coadjutor Bailly a highly 
accomplished cleric who had visited England with Carleton 
in the capacity of tutor to his family. The former obviously 
favoured education rather in theory than in practice. He 
enumerated the various seminaries, that at Quebec for the 
higher education mainly of priests, and the other at Montreal 
which was simply a large free school, together with its 
college. He spoke with warmth of the teaching of the 
nuns, particularly those of the Ursulines and the General 
Hospital, who imparted instruction free and otherwise to 
females, mostly of the better classes. It seems pretty 
clear that virtue and a respect for religion were the chief 
items in a curriculum which the good bishop thought 
fully adequate. When the illiteracy of the parishes with 
a reputed average of three or four to the parish who could 
read and write was brought forward, his lordship accounted 
the figures to be ' wicked calumny ' but admitted that as 
regards men only they might be true. The country cures 
he protested did their utmost to spread education, while 
as for a university presided over by men of unbiassed and 
unprejudiced views, he was of the opinion that men of that 
description had no views at all on sacred matters. He also 
thought that the farmers with so much land to clear would 
prefer to keep their sons at home to clear it rather than to 
spend their savings by providing them with a classical 
education. M. Bailly, the coadjutor, who disliked the 
bishop and was an abler and a wider-minded man, pro- 
ceeded to demolish his superior's arguments with con- 
siderable irony and asked whether Canada was to wait 
for educational facilities till it had been cleared to the 
North Pole. He then proceeded to display an eloquent 

L 



162 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

enthusiasm for non-sectarian education, unusual for his 
class and period, pointing out among other things that 
such a university at Quebec would attract students from 
the Maritime Provinces. The committee reported in 
favour of free schools in every parish and a secondary 
school in every town and district and also of a non- 
sectarian college from which religion was to be rigorously 
excluded. Upon the last head at any rate this committee 
of 1787, which included several Frenchmen, may be regarded 
as a singularly sanguine body of men. It should also be 
related that the income of the Jesuit estates of which only 
four aged members still survived was regarded by all 
Canadian educationalists of that day as their reversion 
by equity if not by right. Dorchester forwarded a petition 
to this effect widely signed in Canada, but in the meantime 
a half-forgotten claim to the property was put in by no 
less a person than General Amherst, who affirmed that it 
had been granted to him at the conquest. This promised 
a sore disappointment to so poor a country, as the estate 
was a matter of some half million acres and though mainly 
wild lands had considerable potential value. The after 
relations with North America of the ' Conqueror of Canada,' 
as the cautious, plodding, uninspiring Amherst had a 
technical right to be called, had not been felicitous when 
in chief command at New York. His claims whether 
valid or not were now staved off by the genuine plea 
that the Jesuit estate had originally been granted by 
Louis XIV. to the Order in trust for the education of 
Canadians and Indians and could not be alienated. The 
dispute continued intermittently for nearly half a century 
when the property passed into the control of the Quebec 
parliament. 

Once again, after the lapse of a decade, Canada had a 
burning domestic question and those responsible for her 
government were free to concentrate themselves upon it. 
The far west alone gave external cause for anxiety, that 
wide domain lately ceded to the United States but still 



THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 163 

sprinkled with small British garrisons, the constant subject 
of protest on the part of the American government to 
Haldimand and now in turn to Dorchester both of whom 
could merely reply that they had no instructions to with- 
draw them. The danger, however, was not so much from 
any direct American action on this account but rather 
from the bad blood between their lawless pioneers and 
the Indians beyond the lakes, whose territories, with no 
regard whatever to the injunctions of Congress, they were 
invading right and left. Bloody skirmishes were already 
going forward with a promise of something more between 
the two races, within touch of the British forts, and a 
general Indian war, which did in fact soon afterwards 
break out, was fraught with grave consequences to Anglo- 
American relations, from the awkward situation of the 
British garrisons. But out in the west at any rate 
Dorchester could do nothing but answer the frequent 
alarmist despatches from his captains there and urge 
them at every hazard to keep their heads. There is no 
good reason to believe that the American government 
were not equally well-meaning and gave similar orders 
to their officers, but they had to deal with an element 
that cared little for Congress or its officials. That the 
Indians were restive is not surprising, and by this time 
they may well have been bewildered as to who was now 
their ' father.' 

But immigrants all this time were flocking over the bound- 
ary line into Canada. The genuine U.E. movement was over. 
The roll of honour had been closed and the last name 
inscribed or practically so upon it. The forty to fifty 
thousand in Canada and the Maritime Provinces to whom 
and to whose descendants for ever the government of the 
day seriously proposed to grant the right of affixing the 
magic letters U.E. after their names, now looked upon all 
new comers from the States with suspicion. There is no 
doubt, however, that as the new settlements showed promise 
of their future, and the fertility of the land became more 



164 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

apparent many friends and relatives of the humbler sort 
of refugees, who had kept out of trouble through the war, 
were tempted to join them by the prospect of free land 
in a country so well reported of. But the mass of the 
new comers were attracted by the last considerations 
alone, tempered often by dissatisfaction with the state 
of things produced in the old colonies by the war. One 
has only to mention the currency and financial difficulties, 
the increased taxation and the fear of more, the uncer- 
tainty of the future government and the lack of unanimity 
with which these difficult questions were approached by 
various States, to understand that many despaired of their 
country and were quite disposed to abandon it if a good 
opportunity offered. The reaction that followed the 
glamour of victory, and the apparently bankrupt condi- 
tions of the country before the genius of Hamilton had 
grappled with the question of unity, concord and finance 
very naturally turned the minds of many doubting souls 
with no strong ties and no tangible recollections of ' British 
tyranny' to this new country, stable at least in its govern- 
ment, and fertile by all accounts in its soil. There is no 
doubt that the spectre of Popery and dread of French 
laws had acted at first as a strong deterrent. But very 
soon questions of a modification at least if not a change 
in these conditions were in the air. The very strength 
of the immigration gave confidence that something would 
be done, and indeed the rulers of Canada and the loyalist 
settlers who had time to indulge in reflection or agitation 
were thinking of little else. The new population came 
in practical contact with neither the scarlet women nor 
the arrogant seignior nor yet the tithe-exacting priest 
of their imaginations. A few hundreds at Sorel and the 
foot of Champlain had settled on lands, at least within 
sight of these belated and mediaeval institutions which 
on close acquaintance lost most of their terrors and at 
any rate held none in store for them. A few stragglers 
even married French women, and if they did not them- 



THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 165 

selves become as Gallic as their wives, their children 
invariably did, and grew up to speak the seventeenth- 
century French as well and pay the priest's dime as cheerfully 
as any descendant of Turgot's earliest shipment of stalwart 
Perche peasants and virtuous Dieppe maidens. But the 
bulk of the new comers, whether of the original elect or 
of the later batches, saw none of these things. In the 
townships west of Montreal, on the Niagara peninsula, or 
again in the Eastern Townships soon surveyed for settle- 
ments, they might have been in the woods of New Brunswick 
so far as any French atmosphere was discernible. Indeed 
it was the French rather for whom one's sympathies are 
enlisted. They had just settled down with almost every- 
thing French Canadians of that day under alien rule could 
expect or wish for. Votes, elective assemblies, and free 
schools were not in their scheme of order or happiness. The 
habitant was waxing prosperous according to his standard. 
His tenure was secure ; the questions which had agitated 
him were the distortions of utterly unsympathetic, alien and 
self-interested intriguers, who had merely played on his 
primitive passions. His priest was the soundest interpreter 
of his well-being such as he was then qualified for and the 
priest was absolutely contented. The seignior and the 
growing bourgeoisie only wanted a little more recognition 
on the Legislative Council which they would certainly 
have got from any reasonable Governor to complete as 
happy a community as the sun shone upon. The impending 
French Revolution if the Americans had let them alone, 
and no U.E. loyalists had been gathering on their western 
flank would, humanly speaking, have destroyed for ever, 
through the influence of their church and Noblesse, every 
tie of sympathy with France and permanently reconciled 
them to the only other monarchy with whom they were 
concerned. For the French Canadian sentiment of that 
day is unthinkable without a king of some sort as a figure- 
head. The only element of future friction, the British 
merchants of Quebec and Montreal, had already established 



166 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

a more social and friendly footing while their commercial, 
value to the country was now recognised by all and by 
none more than the habitant whose grain they bought 
for export. Politically the British merchant, with a royal 
governor and a strong voice in his council, would have 
had nothing to fear. But this Utopia of quite legitimate 
anticipation was now upset and a fresh start had to be 
made. 

These large grants and settlements of freehold land 
within and without their borders alarmed the seigniors, 
who feared it would depreciate their own properties and 
make their tenants restless. A move was made in the 
Legislative Council for reconsidering their land laws, but all 
the seigniors were stoutly opposed to it except Carleton's 
friend and military secretary, De Lanaudiere, whose seign- 
iory of thirty-five square leagues he would willingly, he 
declared, surrender to the Crown and receive back again 
under terms of free and common soccage. They had, he 
declared, within the seigniories, an immense territory but 
sparsely cleared and meagrely settled, and was it likely 
that immigrants would take up their abode under conditions 
they detested. It may be doubted if they would have been 
altogether welcome had they ventured to do so. The feature 
of the seigniorial system that militated most against 
material progress was the lods et ventes, the payment, that 
is to say, of the twelfth part of the purchase money to the 
seignior every time a parcel of land, howsoever improved 
by buildings or otherwise, changed hands. This of course 
tended to discourage all improvement 

The first Royal visit was now paid to Canada in the person 
of the sailor Prince, afterwards William IV., as captain of a 
war ship. The hearty manners of this young man made 
him a favourite in every British dependency, and an admir- 
able stimulant to colonial loyalty had Canada needed any. 
De Gaspe tells us in his memoirs that he was the despair of 
Lady Dorchester at her state balls for the persistency with 
which he chose his partners where he listed, rather than 



THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 167 

where ceremony required. At Sorel, where Government 
had encouraged the beginnings of a town and shipyards, 
the inhabitants were so delighted with the genial young 
man that they christened their town William Henry. But 
Sorel, though but a modest aspirant to urban rank, had 
bitten its name too deep into the story of two wars to readily 
accept such violation of its past, and remained Sorel in 
spite of the sustained efforts of official documents to the 
contrary. The agitation for an assembly among the British 
mercantile class had never ceased, in spite of the assumed 
finality of the Quebec Act. Adam Lymburner, a leading 
Quebec merchant, had quite recently been sent to London 
with a petition to that effect. Their difficulty, however, 
now that their former monstrous pretensions to Protestant 
monopoly could no longer be seriously proposed, was to 
secure good value for their efforts, and in their pursuit of 
political emancipation, not ultimately to find themselves the 
sport of an emancipated habitant, for that was not by any 
means what they were aiming at. With such a possible 
catastrophe embarrassing the efforts of the class he repre- 
sented, Lymburner proposed to the British Government that 
Quebec and Montreal, now containing a tenth part of the 
population, should return half the members. Lymburner 
had been followed by a petition covering sixteen pages, 
with French signatures, protesting against any changes, and 
treating the sacred question of popular government with an 
almost contemptuous levity that would have made the blood 
of Patrick Henry, or of John Adams, turn cold. But the 
loyalist influx now introduced silent arguments for this new 
departure infinitely more potent than all the thunders of the 
old British faction at Quebec. 

By 1790 there were probably between twenty and thirty 
thousand of the refugees and their successors within the 
Government of Quebec, and the tide was still flowing. It 
was patent now to all that the machinery of government 
would have to be recast, and those who thought that a 
representative assembly could be deferred in the presence 



168 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

of such a phalanx of hereditary freemen must have been 
sanguine indeed. It was all very well for the American 
Whigs in the abounding metaphor of their kind and period 
to call the Tories ' sons of despotism.' But as a matter of 
fact there had been no vital difference in political ethics 
among the so-called Whigs and Tories, between whom the 
war opened such an impassable chasm. They had objected 
equally to the aggressive measures of the Crown. Both had 
dressed in homespun, and adjured imported luxuries as a 
protest against them. They differed only in their views on 
the right methods of resistance, and there was unfortunately 
no room here for a difference. That was the tragedy of the 
domestic side of the American war. Men who had never 
voted against each other even in the mild divisions of a 
provincial assembly, who had seen eye to eye in every 
conceivable question, and had protested together against 
the Stamp Act, the tea tax, and all the rest of it, found 
themselves suddenly called upon to decide, without com- 
promise and without delay, on a plan of action, not on a 
political opinion. Even had it been purely a matter of 
principle, few sober men could have foretold what road his 
nearest neighbour would choose, so unexpected and mo- 
mentous a decision was it that either had to make. But a 
score of other influences were at work on both sides ; fear, 
self-interest, persuasive counsels, eloquent pens and tongues, 
family ties. The U.E. loyalist, therefore, though his 
passion for the British connection was fired by the trials he 
had suffered on its behalf, was no more likely to sit down 
quietly under the most benignant despotism than his old 
rebel friends and neighbours in Virginia and Massachusetts. 
His peculiar experiences had made of him a somewhat 
strange mixture of political sentiment. He is, in short, a 
unique figure in history. So far as I know you may look in 
vain elsewhere for a truculently anti-republican democrat. 
If the expression sounds hopelessly paradoxical it is never- 
theless sufficiently accurate, for he had nothing in common 
with the British ' Tory democrat ' of a recent age. If his 



THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 169 

characteristics had died with him they would be less remark- 
able as the product only of untoward personal experiences,but 
he transmitted themtohis children and his children's children. 
Even to-day the unsophisticated but intelligent European 
traveller may perchance find himself confronted by some 
country farmer of what may possibly seem to one unversed 
in the subtler shades of transatlantic ethnology the most 
pronounced type of American rustic with the finest of 
American accents ; while he himself, dimly conscious of 
being regarded as something like a foreigner, and doubtless 
feeling one under the painfully critical eye of a wholly un- 
familiar type of rural Briton, may quite likely strike a 
spark of Imperialistic eloquence or sentiment that suggests 
the period of the battle of Waterloo or the coronation of 
Queen Victoria. The aforesaid visitor will be surprised 
both at its fervour and yet more at its flavour, and a vague 
sense of its incongruity will mayhap supervene, as he con- 
fronts the very incarnation of latter-day democracy in 
demeanour and person, but otherwise a militant monarchist 
of a departed type. The somewhat puzzled stranger will 
hardly grasp the true inwardness of the situation or fully 
realise that he has lighted upon, and himself unconsciously 
lit, the still smouldering embers of the old truculent U.E. 
loyalism which, in politer circles, is embodied in a less 
antique form. In an entertaining little book by a well- 
known English novelist of Ontario rearing, I remember 
that the scene opens on a rugged old farmer of the Niagara 
district who, in all good nature, has just taken up in his 
spring waggon a chance but well-dressed wayfarer. The 
unsuspecting agriculturalist opens at once on his favourite 
topic, the war of 181 2, in which his father had fought some 
sixty years previously, and thereby elucidating the almost 
unthinkable fact that he is conferring his favours on a 
stranger from the wrong side of the line. Upon this dis- 
tressing discovery he pulls his team up short, hitches it to 
the fence, and insists on the American gentleman alighting, 
taking off his coat and engaging in a pugilistic encounter 



170 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

by the road-side on general U.E. principles. The other, 
who is visiting Canada for the first time, dumfounded that 
such a spirit could still exist, but with a sense of humour 
overmastering his annoyance, enters into the spirit of the 
thing, and for a round or two parries the blows of the 
enraged and long-memoried patriot till want of breath or a 
sense of satisfied national honour on the part of this 
descendant of Butler's Rangers terminates the combat. 
After this, if memory serves me, they shake hands, resume 
their coats, and drive on together the best of friends. This 
of course is fooling, but quite admirable fooling, and very 
much to the point, and as a caricature even yet not wholly 
out of date. 

The proportion of British born to American born, among 
the rank and file at any rate of the loyalist exiles, is impos- 
sible to assess. There had been considerable immigration 
into America after the peace of 1763, and though the 
strongest element in this was Scotch-Irish who, from the 
smart of recent treatment, would have been rarely Tories, it 
is probable that the inclination of the others, English, 
Scottish, German, and even Catholic Irish, their old regard 
for stable institutions, and their inevitable early prejudices 
against their new compatriots, not yet rubbed off, leaned 
towards the Tory side. As the later Scotch-Irish fought by 
hundreds in the American ranks, so these others, not yet 
well established, often still landless, readily swayed by 
instinct, or sometimes by a higher form of loyalty, and as 
often by a soldier's pay, contributed very largely to the 
other side. Of the 2500 who actually divided the £3,000,000 
disbursed by the court of claims altogether up to the year 
1790, more than half, we know, were of British birth. These 
successful claimants roughly represented the men of former 
estate and of professional position. The English born would 
incline towards a return to England ; the others still more to- 
wards remaining in North America. Almost certainly there- 
fore a majority of the elite of the loyalists in Canada and the 
Maritime Provinces were Americans by birth and tradition. 



THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 171 

It was now admitted by almost all whose opinions 
mattered and would have weight, that an elective assembly 
was inevitable, and concurrently with this lay a far more 
burning question, that of the division of the province into 
separate governments. The point of division was so to 
speak ready made, namely, that where the new English 
settlements began on Lake St. Francis and the spot at 
which the provinces of Quebec and Ontario meet to-day. 
It was into the latter, then, for some time yet to be 
known as Upper Canada, that the bulk of the British- 
American immigration went, though the considerable 
German and loyal Dutch element in it must by no means 
be forgotten. Here beyond doubt was the nucleus of a 
Protestant English-speaking province, that could live under 
its own laws and faith and at no point clash with the 
customs and administrations of Quebec or Lower Canada. 
This was simple enough. But at the prospect of division 
a bitter cry arose from the old British subjects of Quebec 
and Montreal as well as from the recent immigrants into 
the lower country. The old merchant class with their de- 
pendants may by this have numbered between two and three 
thousand, the recent settlers perhaps as many more. The 
former were now to be at last hoisted, in a sense, with 
their own petard, for with the rapid peopling of Upper 
Canada they had looked forward to popular government, 
as they somewhat sanguinely though naturally interpreted 
an assembly to mean. Their last petition, just before the 
loyalist settlements, had in its suggested legislation con- 
ceded somewhat to the French, since it was proposed that 
the three towns should have half the seats in the assembly 
eligible only to Protestants, while the rest of the country 
might elect Catholics at will. Now it promised to be no 
longer necessary to put forward claims for an assembly 
saddled with the offensive conditions of whole or partial 
disfranchisement of their French fellow-subjects. They 
could freely join with the Upper Canadians and the 
French in a reasonable unfettered demand for the natural 



172 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

rights of British colonial subjects such as had already been 
granted to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The French, 
if they were mostly indifferent in the matter, contained 
a small bourgeois element that had by now achieved some 
political aspirations. In any case they would not stand in 
the way, and if for the moment they were in a numerical 
majority, the others would possess the political vigour and 
experience and within measurable time as it seemed a 
numerical equality as well. Now at last one's sympathies 
honestly go out to these people, the mercantile pioneers 
of Canada. It was not that they suffered seriously under 
the Quebec Act and this ' governing of the French accord- 
ing to French ideas,' as the modern cant has it. But 
they were inconvenienced in minor matters, in the com- 
plications that surrounded the purchase or tenure of land 
for a country house for instance. But their real grievance 
was the utter indifference to expansion and progress, the 
perfect content with the present that the French system, 
as they thought, encouraged. They wanted the country to 
grow as the English colonies grew, and their trade with it. 
And now this rumour of division seemed to sound the 
very knell of all their hopes. They were to have an 
assembly of a truth, but where would they be in it ? A 
pitiful four or five thousand in all against the 100,000 
French that Haldimand's recent census had enumerated. 
Quebec was to be, in fact, definitely regarded as a French 
province. The swarming thousands of the future who had 
promised for a blissful moment to correct all this were now 
to be cut off in a country to themselves. Mr. Lymburner 
represented, as I have said, the Quebec merchants in 
England, and he pleaded for the abolition of the Quebec 
Act, which circumstances had already doomed, and against 
the division of the province with much ability, before a 
committee of the House of Commons. Dorchester had 
been requested by Lord Sydney then in office, to send 
home opinions on the future government of Canada. 
Personally he was in favour of moving cautiously and 



THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 173 

of retaining for a time a modified form of the present 
system. He thought division somewhat premature, and 
that for the present the new districts might be organised 
as counties. But as it was likely to be decided otherwise, 
he forwarded suggestions upon those lines. His long 
colonial experience enabled him, among other things, to 
quash a ministerial suggestion of hereditary legislation 
with simple and unanswerable logic. Nothing shows the 
inability of British statesmen of those days to realise 
colonial communities, with their fluctuations of individual 
fortune and other prohibitory features, than their almost 
chronic desire to create everywhere some kind of nobility. 
Dorchester in this same letter (to Grenville) is equally 
against quit rents for which irritating superfluity they 
also had a passion. The English statesmen of that time 
could never quite divest their minds of the sacredness of 
land such as they knew it, and a certain reluctance to 
frankly create freeholds wholesale. Nothing is more certain 
than the virtual impossibility of realising the nature of 
a primitive country till it has been seen with the eye. Who 
shall say what blunders and disappointments and losses 
have arisen, from absentee administration, public and 
private, on account of this one single and insurmountable 
fact. Governments could not understand as their com- 
mercial contemporaries concerned with such things very 
often could not understand that men cannot clear virgin 
forest and pay rent concurrently. The fact too of money 
going out of a new country in rents for lands only made 
serviceable by the colonists' labour created a bad 
impression. 

The most interesting contribution to the new problem 
was that of Chief-Justice Smith, who draws on his long 
and intimate experience of government in old colonies and 
the troubles that arose in them. Here indeed we find a 
Federationist eighty years before his time. * A native as 
I am of one of the older provinces and early in the public 
service and councils, I trace the late jevolt and rent to a 



174 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

remoter cause than those to which it is ordinarily ascribed. 
The troubles in the old colonies/ he continued, 'arose 
from their having outgrown their several governments and 
wanted the time to remedy half a century ago before the 
late rupture occurred. It should have been the parts of 
our fathers to have found a cure in the erection of a power 
upon the continent itself to control all its little republics 
and create a partner in the legislation of the Empire 
capable of consulting their own safety and the common 
welfare.' And again : ' I am old enough to remember what 
we in the Maritime Provinces dreaded from this French 
colony in the north and what it cost to take away that 
dread which confined our population to the edges of the 
Atlantic.' Enclosed in the same document is a carefully 
propounded scheme for the federation of the two provinces 
of Upper and Lower Canada with Nova Scotia, New 
Brunswick, and Newfoundland. The general lines are 
those upon which the present Dominion of Canada is laid. 
It is worth noting too that Dorchester also recommended 
something of the sort to the Home Government. 

On March 7, 1791, the new act was introduced into the 
House of Commons by Mr. Pitt, who still fought so hard 
for the Hereditary legislator that the clause was actually 
passed by a majority of 88 to 39, to remain in permanent 
abeyance through the recognition of successive Canadian 
governments of its utter absurdity. The province was 
divided in the manner already indicated and in fact very 
much as it stands to-day. Mr. Lymburner addressed the 
House for several hours on March 23rd on behalf of 
the party he represented, urging the total repeal of the 
Quebec Act, and protesting against division as ' a violent 
measure which could never be recalled.' It was recalled 
in fifty years as every one knows in favour of re-union 
which proved a complete failure. He accused the Quebec 
Act of introducing a confusion which had existed in a 
greater degree under the ordinance of 1763 which pre- 
ceded it. He declared that there was small reason for 



THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 175 

division as Niagara Falls would prove an insuperable barrier 
for all time against the transport of produce from the 
country beyond and would in fact remain the permanent 
limit of the province. Even canals which Haldimand had 
already begun were outside this gentleman's wildest 
dreams. In fifty years this hopeless country was the 
garden of Canada ! The difficulty of equitably apportion- 
ing the customs collected at Montreal was a more real 
though not an insuperable one. Blundering again in 
ignorance of the quality of the new settlers, Lymburner 
foretold that they would have no thoughts for legislative 
cares or duties under the engrossing cares of manual 
labour. This excellent but prejudiced Scotch trader had 
not yet realised that he had many superiors in political 
training and knowledge of the world in readiness at the 
Kingston and Niagara clearings to show of what metal 
they were made. 

He told the House of Commons that these benighted 
beings would for many years merely choose their repre- 
sentatives from among the traders in Montreal and Quebec. 
He also told the familiar story of inefficient judges and 
miscarried justice which Dorchester's commission had 
already exposed. Having declared himself of these 
infelicitous prognostications which were all falsified within 
his own long life, and many other destructive arguments, 
he then went on to the constructive theories of his party, 
modified by unpalatable concessions to the inevitable. His 
allies, the London merchants trading with Canada, also 
presented a petition to parliament against the Bill. 

On April 21st the latter went into committee, and a 
member complained that no attention had yet been paid to 
the details of the question, but that gentleman had seized 
the opportunity to air their opinions on general questions 
of government. Fox, who knew nothing whatever of the 
conditions of Canada, and probably cared less, objected to 
being thus pinned down to the business in hand, and Burke, 
who also found the subject a spur to his eloquence, and was 



176 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

equally vague with regard to the practical side of the 
question, joined issue with his friend on the more congenial 
theme of the French Revolution, a parenthetical digression 
which culminated in their famous and final quarrel. Indeed, 
this debate, apart from the misfortune his irrelevant treat- 
ment of it brought him, seems to have been mainly service- 
able to Burke in providing occasion for sonorous and 
alliterative adjectives, though ' bleak and barren ' were not 
felicitous ones in the case of a country of universal forests 
and remarkable fertility. That, however, did not much 
matter in the House of Commons, nor would it very much 
perhaps now. Then, as to-day, the opinions of many 
private members were expressed with much complacency, 
and difficulties seemed quite trifling to those cocksure 
orators and country squires, which had exercised the wits of 
Dorchester and Haldimand, Smith, and Maseres for years, 
to say nothing of ministers who, with much pains and 
inquiry, had drafted the bill. However, the latter was 
carried through both Houses, and ratified on May 14, 
1791. Since the loss of the colonies, and the attention 
attracted to North America by the war, Canada had become 
a subject of more interest to the average Briton than she 
had been during the passing of the Quebec Act, nearly two 
decades earlier, and on some of the clauses of the Canada 
Act nearly a third of the Houses recorded their votes. 
Dorchester was not present in England during the discus- 
sion and passing of the Act, a draft of which had been sent 
to him for revision, and may be read to-day with his sug- 
gested alterations. It had been intended otherwise, and 
such was his own wish, not only on account of the import- 
ance of the measure to Canada, but for the sake of his 
health. What is known, however, as the ' Nootka incident ' 
had occurred in 1790, in which Spain had seized some 
British trading vessels from Vancouver Island. She refused 
all satisfaction, and brought the two countries to the brink 
of rupture, only yielding when France, being in no mood 
for a great war to small purpose, refused her support. It 



THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 177 

was not the prospect of a Spanish war in itself that created 
anxiety so much as the fear lest the United States should 
take the opportunity to seize the western posts. When the 
danger had passed Dorjchester sailed for England, arriving 
in the autumn of 179 1, soon after the passing of the Act. 
He left the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Alured Clarke, in his 
place, and to him fell, in his superior's absence, to inaugurate 
the new form of government, which was done with much 
jubilation and ceremony in the closing week of the same 
year that saw it through the House of Commons. 



M 



178 THE MAKING OF CANADA 



CHAPTER VIII 

UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 

Clarke had gained some reputation in the West Indies, 
and lost none of it at Quebec during the two years of Dor- 
chester's absence. In 1793 he divided the French Province 
for elective purposes into counties, giving them homely and 
inappropriate English names, which have long disappeared. 
Most of these returned two members, while Quebec and 
Montreal were allotted four apiece, amounting to about fifty 
in all. The Legislative Council remained as before, and con- 
stituted an Upper House, while the power of veto was with 
the Governor. The franchise and qualification for candidates 
were both liberal. The Crown withdrew all right to taxa- 
tion, except such duties as might be imposed for the regula- 
tion of commerce, the revenue from which, however, was to 
be applied to the use of the province in which it was raised. 
There was also provision for the exchange of seignioral 
tenure into freehold on individual petition. The Crown, 
in the meantime, reserved to itself the fullest powers of 
veto and appointment. As regards the Lower Province, 
it is hardly necessary to say that the general principles of 
the Quebec Act were to be maintained, and the country 
governed with a full measure of respect for French ideas. 
The British settlers, both old and new, were bitterly dis- 
appointed at being enclosed within a province that, humanly 
speaking, must always be, in the main, a French one. Still, 
one must consider the times. It was not as if they were being 
handed over to the complete disposal of an unfriendly 
majority. The Governor, who nominated his Council and 
Executive chosen from it, would, together with several of the 



UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 179 

latter, be always of their race and creed. They were not in 
the helpless position that would be theirs as a minority in a 
modern isolated self-governing colony. On the contrary, 
in all vital matters, the traditions of that day amply secured 
them, and according to modern views, more than secured 
them, as will be seen. The English of the cities were to 
continue subject to the inconveniences, which to them were 
no doubt considerable, of modified French law, and other 
kindred matters of secondary consideration. They had no 
injustice nor resentment to fear, for no power to cause it 
was in reality conceded. As to the agricultural settlers, 
they had less still. They had been planted on wild lands 
surveyed on English lines, and held them in free and 
common soccage. The Habeas corpus was now in force in 
the province, and so was trial by jury in civil cases when 
litigants chose to demand it. The Roman Church did not 
touch them in any way. They erected their own places of 
worship with perfect liberty as to sect or creed, while the 
Anglicans were now supplied with a Bishop in Quebec, the 
excellent Dr. Mountain, and assisted by the missionary 
societies of England to pastors of their own faith. 

In the Eastern Townships particularly, that beautiful and 
fertile region of hill and stream lying on the southern fron- 
tier against the Lakes and Highlands of Northern New 
Hampshire and Vermont became a little imperium in 
imperio of British settlement. It had not been opened 
to the militant U.E. loyalists for reasons of caution already 
stated. But just before and after the separation of the 
provinces, agricultural settlers from the adjoining States, 
with a keen eye to good land, sane views on the matter of 
British tyranny, doubts occasionally as to the drift of things 
in their own country, and no particular objection to con- 
siderable tracts of land, obtainable on easy terms, drifted in 
there by hundreds, to be reinforced later by some good 
elements from the Old country. Great as was the natural 
disappointment of the Quebec British at being cut off from 
the rising tide of British immigration to the west of them, 



180 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

the peopling of the Eastern Townships, and that, too, mainly 
by American settlers, is sufficient proof that they had 
nothing serious to fear. Judged by modern ethics, a mis- 
guided and foolish standard, it was the French who had 
most to complain of. The modern French Canadian, like 
the modern English democrat of the unreflective and less 
instructed kind who indulges in retrospective flights, is apt 
to be a sad sinner in this respect. He is not often a his- 
torical student. The more enlightened French Canadian 
and cleric of that day knew their period at any rate, and 
represented it. That they recognised their English rulers, 
with all their faults of manner, as a generation ahead of 
their time is sufficiently obvious from the tenor of their 
whole correspondence. They were doubtless mutely con- 
scious of what their own people would have done had the 
situations been reversed. It is a pity that their descendants 
do not more often throw their minds back to that alter- 
native. A note of genuine gratitude, the consciousness of 
experiencing a treatment beyond the ethics of their own 
day, underlies most of their ample correspondence. Even 
their occasional protests against this or that particular 
action, show that they are dealing with an unaccustomed 
standard of policy and know it. Because there were one 
hundred thousand Canadians and perhaps five thousand 
British in the province in 1791, the 'new subjects' did 
not expect the Governor's Council to consist of fifteen 
Frenchmen and two English members, and it was only 
reasonable. The counting of heads was not yet in vogue. 
The first council, as a matter of fact, which was practically 
the old one, included eight Frenchmen — De Levy, De 
St. Ours, Francois Baby, De Longueuil, and De Lanaudiere 
being the most prominent. Of the others, Finlay (Post- 
master-General), Pownal, John Fraser and Sir Henry Cald- 
well (Receiver-General and of Quebec Siege fame) seem to 
call for chief mention. Chief-Justice Smith was Speaker, 
Dr. Mabane, the ablest perhaps of the earlier British 
councillors of Canada, and the intimate friend of Haldi- 



UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 181 

mand, had retired. There is no evidence that the French 
in general were particularly exhilarated by the present of 
an elective Assembly, such appreciation as there was being 
mainly confined to the bourgeois class, who were now 
perhaps one-thirtieth of the population. The habitants 
had mainly a blank mind upon the matter, but no doubt 
received the instructions of their more gifted friends upon 
their newly-acquired importance in a fashion one would give 
a great deal to hear something of. No picture remains, 
however, so far as I know, of a situation and its accompani- 
ments that must have been prolific of interest and humour. 
But neither the little Parliament of Lower Canada nor the 
smaller one of the Upper Province, was to be by any means 
the authoritative assembly that, at the first sight, it looks 
on paper, or even such as the colonial legislatures, which 
had just given such a lesson to Great Britain, had been, and 
perhaps for that reason. The Governor and his council, 
which last, to a great extent, was the Governor, were to have 
no qualms whatever about throwing out objectionable bills. 
A House of Commons is not very effective, merely as an 
advisory body, without the power of the purse and an 
executive responsible to it. And it was a long time before 
either Canadian Assembly enjoyed these privileges with 
sufficient amplitude to use them with effect. Perhaps, on 
the whole, it was as well, and that by slow degrees, they 
should work out their own salvation. 

In this first elective Assembly of Quebec that met in 
December 1793, a fourth of the members were British, a 
proportion about maintained during the half century of its 
existence prior to that temporary fusion of the two provinces 
which proved such a failure. Panet, a clever French 
advocate, was elected Speaker, and many interesting ques- 
tions of procedure and detail arose, the lingual one, of 
course, being prominent. Having said that the language 
was left optional in debate, the clerk acting as interpreter 
when necessary, and that the journals were to be kept in 
both languages, we may leave the first Anglo-French parlia- 



182 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

ment of Canada, making its address to the King of 'joy and 
gratitude ' for calling them into existence, to face that future 
which was not to prove quite all they perhaps expected. 

Before turning our attention westward, however, to the 
other province, it may be noted as a social event that Prince 
Edward, her late Majesty's father, had arrived in Quebec 
with his regiment, the 7th Fusiliers, in the summer of 1791, 
just before Dorchester's departure, and remained there for 
over two years. He achieved great social popularity, and 
Kent House, near Montmorency Falls, still serves as a 
country hotel, to remind both the tourist and the native of 
so interesting and ancient a connection between Canada 
and the reigning House. For the late Duke of Kent was 
altogether nearly seven years in British North America. 

To a few again, it will have an interest as the white 
elephant of poor Haldimand, who built it for himself, and 
could find neither tenant nor purchaser when he left Canada. 
For Dorchester, the natural successor to his tenements, 
failed him, since her ladyship absolutely refused to trust her 
now numerous brood in such close vicinity to the yawning 
chasm of the falls. Nova Scotia had already a Bishop, 
with jurisdiction over the handful of missionaries and army 
chaplains who safeguarded the souls of the Quebec Anglican, 
and preached to them in the Chapel of the Recollets and 
elsewhere, for such at present was the shelterless condition 
of the Church of the ascendency. The arrival of their own 
Bishop Jacob Mountain, late a Norwich rector, and Fellow 
of Caius, Cambridge, has been already noted. It is said 
that he was greeted with much cordiality by his Catholic 
brother Bishop Hubert, kissed upon both cheeks, and 
informed that it was full time he had come .0 keep his 
people in order. 

The winter mails to Europe,too,had exercised theCanadian 
officials no little. Sending them 200 miles by sleigh to 
Albany, whence a stage coach of dubious habits and un- 
certain pace conveyed them to New York, was not as may 
be imagined a lighting service. But beyond this the U.S. 



UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 183 

postal authorities were so unaccommodating to Canadian 
packages and so exorbitant in their charges, that the wit 
of Mr. Hugh Findlay had been set to work to devise what 
would in modern phraseology be styled an ' All Red route.' 
This had in fact been accomplished just before the division 
of the province. Halifax and St. John, then as now, two 
open winter ports of British North America on the Atlantic, 
vied with almost the zeal of modern rivalry for the mail 
contract. They were calmed by an equal division of 
favours ; a packet in short was to sail in alternate fortnights 
from either. Modern analogy ceases when we find the 
mails carried by walking postmen for hundreds of miles 
through the wintry woods from Quebec to Nova Scotia till 
roads could be cut. 

When it is remembered that the crisis of the French 
Revolution and the fall of that monarchy had occurred 
with the apparent destruction of most things that French 
Canadians revered, it might be fairly supposed that Canada 
would at length cut her last tie of sentiment with the 
mother-country, and whatever external movements might 
in future threaten British rule in the colony, they would 
assuredly not come from France. Singularly enough and 
for reasons which will presently transpire this was anything 
but the case. For the next few years, the last of Dor- 
chester's administration, the country was agitated within 
and threatened without by the French Revolution, to an 
extent, short of actual invasion, as great as had been the 
case of the earlier Revolution upon her very borders. 

John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of 
Upper Canada, arrived in Quebec in the autumn of 1791, 
but was delayed there till the following summer through 
the non-arrival from England of certain officials who were 
vital to the administrative machinery of the new province. 
He was a man of parts, character and energy. His father, 
a north-countryman as the name implies, was a naval 
captain and unfortunate enough to die on board his ship 
as it was actually sailing from Halifax to Quebec on the 



1 84 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

ever-glorious expedition of 1759. The son, though of 
Northumbrian stock and birth, inherited property in Devon- 
shire, was educated at Eton and Oxford and gazetted to 
the 35th Regiment in 1771. Proceeding to America at the 
opening of the war he was first under fire at the Battle of 
Brandywine, and immediately afterwards got his heart's 
desire, the command, namely, of irregulars. These were the 
New York Rangers, which under his energetic leadership 
acquired for themselves and their young commander a con- 
siderable reputation by four years of continual fighting and 
campaigning. Captured with Cornwallis, Simcoe returned 
to England and his estate on parole, and with a constitu- 
tion weakened by his incessant activities. He was some- 
thing of a scholar and an almost too ready penman in 
the way of despatch-writing. He kept a journal, how- 
ever, of his campaigns, which Mr. Duncan Scott, his 
recent biographer, tells us is written 'in the swelling 
style of the ancients,' and, in short, a trifle out of scale. 
He also wrote verses, some of which, in the heroic style, 
show at least his ardour and patriotism, and a good ear 
for cadence. He was a good specimen of a certain type 
of eighteenth-century British officer, of active habit and 
literary instinct, high principle and ready sword, a type 
of which Wolfe and Burgoyne in their different ways were 
conspicuous examples. Simcoe sat in Parliament for a 
time, and as a successful leader of colonial troops seems to 
have been freely consulted at headquarters. He was at 
least held sufficiently in regard to be appointed first 
Governor of the new province. Dorchester, knowing 
nothing of this, had urged the appointment of Sir John 
Johnson, whose rank, parentage and experience would seem 
to fit him for it. Born on a frontier to a baronetcy won by 
his father for incalculable frontier service, and himself reared 
in the picturesque turmoil that, almost ever since his back- 
woods German mother bore him, had shaken the northern 
borderland, and at the same time familiar with a wider and 
politer world, his claims were obviously strong. But the 



UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 185 

government, it seems, thought he knew too much and was 
too deeply involved in local affairs for supreme authority, 
so they made him Superintendent-General of the Indian 
department instead. A newly-raised regiment was sent out 
to Simcoe, named from his old corps, who had long ex- 
changed their swords for Nova Scotian ploughshares. With 
these and three of his councillors, Osgoode, Russell and 
Grant, he set out from Quebec for the West in June 1792. 

After three weeks in the Kingston settlements he sailed 
up Lake Ontario for Niagara, where, among the clearings 
on the British side of the river the first Governor of Upper 
Canada was to be inaugurated. Nearly a decade had now 
passed away since the first settlement, and how had these 
early makers of Ontario fared in the Kingston townships 
and in the western peninsular? They had experienced a 
far harder struggle than their compatriots in the maritime 
provinces, if they had better land. The others were on the 
seaboard, and supplies could reach them easily from both 
Old and New England. More corn was circulating, and one 
must think too that more money from the loyalist Court of 
Claims found its way there. Sawn lumber and shingles 
for building were plentiful, for hundreds of good houses had 
been erected at once. Upper Canada, on the other hand, 
was deplorably isolated. It is a two or three hours' run 
now on the Grand Trunk from Montreal to Kingston, but 
the settlers on the Bay of Quinte might for years have been 
virtually in another planet so almost wholly do they seem to 
have been dependent on what they made or produced with 
their own hands. In the first two or three years, though 
supplied with rations by the Government, there was a pain- 
ful scarcity of tools, even of axes, while of grindstones there 
were none, of ploughs scarcely any, though had there been 
more there would have been nothing like enough animals to 
pull them. Later on these also were supplied by Govern- 
ment. But the hoe seems to have been the chief depend- 
ancy for grubbing the hardly cleared ground, and even for 
want of extra clothes and blankets there was for a long 



1 86 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

time great suffering. The French method of settlement, 
the elongated strips which entailed at least propinquity of 
residence, had much to be said for it. The English settler 
on the chess-board system he has always affected, together 
with his pride of acreage, added individual to corporate 
isolation: not, however, in the spirit, for the pioneer was 
the incarnation of mutual help, but in the fact. Save in 
Kingston itself where the requirements of a small garrison 
advanced things more rapidly, the rest of the townships 
were a long time in struggling out of the homespun and 
log-hut stage of existence. The many rapids of the St. 
Lawrence made transport difficult from Montreal, and there 
was practically no road there. The live stock difficulty had 
been very great, while in the crop failure and famine of 
1787 such as had been collected was either devoured, even 
to horses, or perished. Mere food since then had been 
plentiful, but there were no markets. Fine crops of fall 
wheat, an earnest of the future, had been grown in the 
crude clearings, but there were not enough accessible mills 
to grind it even for home consumption, and the primi- 
tive method had to be resorted to of pounding it in mortars 
or grinding it in coffee mills. Flax and hemp were grown, 
and small flocks of sheep in constant danger from the 
wolves and bears were raised, which by degrees produced 
wool enough for the spinning wheels that whirred in the log- 
cabins. The French Canadian smoked comfortably by his 
stove through the winter months, but the pioneers of Upper 
Canada had as yet to huddle round the great open fire- 
places in the stone chimneys, for which in truth there was 
no stint of fuel. 

And in the nights of winter 

When the cold north winds blow 

And the long howling of the wolves 

Is heard amidst the snow. 

When round the lonely cottage 

Roars loud the tempest's din 

And the good logs of Algidus 

Roar louder yet within. 



UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 187 

When the goodman mends his armour, 
And trims his helmet plume, 
When the goodwife's shuttle merrily 
Goes flashing through the gloom. 



The goodman of the Canadian bush had laid aside his 
armour to be sure, but with no certainty that he would not 
have to furbish it up again, and in the meantime we may be 
certain his hands were as busy as those of his womenfolk 
in the blaze of logs that flared more unsparingly, we may 
safely say, than ever did those of Italy. If there was no 
talk of Horatius to go round, no pioneer people ever 
perhaps had such a fund of stirring reminiscence to cheer 
their solitude. All but the very young had lived through 
seventeen years of war. Some had fought through 
the whole of them against French, Indians, and fellow- 
Americans. The majority had borne arms throughout the 
latter struggle, while the women had known something 
more than the anxieties of soldiers' wives. There were 
men here too — English, Hessians, Highlanders — who had 
served in the Low Countries, the West Indies, and the 
Mediterranean. If books were scarce and the present was 
one of arduous monotony, there was in truth no lack of 
colouring in theL past, or of material for reminiscence. It 
was a time, too, of great events. Two young republics, 
things of horror to these people, were labouring into life ; 
the one at their doors, the other of the nation best known of 
any foreign one to that generation of Americans, and when 
news came up to Kingston and filtered through the settle- 
ments, whether true or not it was generally worth hearing. 
Their fellow-refugees, the Indians of the Six Nations, 
proved friends in need, with innumerable primitive methods 
for making life bearable, which the average American 
farmer of the eighteenth century had never had occasion 
for, but were welcome enough now that he was flung back 
into the condition of his great-grandfather. Deer-skin 
moccasins supplied the place of shoes, and stockings were 



188 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

wofully scarce. There were no doctors, and as an appeal 
to the Government still extant in the State papers shows, 
there were scarcely any drugs. Of schools for a long time 
there were none, and an occasional itinerant preacher was 
the only religious consolation for many years available. 
Good health, however, and its concomitant good spirits at 
least were theirs. Of wild fowl in the fall of the year, of 
fish at most seasons there was an abundance, and venison to 
be had by the hunter. If want of time and lack of appli- 
ances were doubtless some hindrance to much success in 
the chase, the Indians settled round them, one may safely 
assert, made up such deficiencies. Finality in such a situa- 
tion which may betimes depress the weak offers vast com- 
pensations to the strong either in body or in mind. Few 
here could get away and give up the struggle. They had 
to see it through, and this determination, combined with 
numerical strength and unity of purpose, if born of hard 
necessity, bore in time lasting fruit. The half-pay officer, 
and the ex-merchant, emerged from the contest into the 
comparative comfort secured by those who saw the century 
out, a tanned and toil-worn veteran with all those signs of a 
long struggle with primitive nature in the woods which will 
be familiar enough to many of my readers. Grist and saw 
mills arose, and men no longer pounded their wheat into 
flour with stones or with cannon balls suspended from 
balanced logs. Frame houses took the place of the log 
cabins ; merchants set up country stores, and in exchange 
for country produce supplied in abundance those articles 
of domestic commerce that had been conspicuous hitherto 
for their absence or for their rude home-make. The grain 
buyer made his appearance, provided with better facilities 
for getting the wheat down the river to Montreal, while the 
garrison kept in Upper Canada both at Kingston and 
Niagara created a considerable local demand. Nor were 
better wheat crops ever raised in a new country, not even 
in Manitoba, than those harvested upon the virgin soils of 
Upper Canada while the stumps were yet upon the ground. 



UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 189 

Stock multiplied, and the wolf and bear, retiring ever 
northwards, ceased at length their ravaging. Roads of such 
kind as the pre-Macadam world would everywhere put up 
with, whether about Boston or Philadelphia, nay even about 
York and Bristol, were run through settlements or cordu- 
royed through the pungent cedar swamps. How the broad 
fertile fringe of Ontario, now flat, now undulating and ever 
deepening towards the more rugged back country and 
quickly pressing westward to join the yet more fertile lands 
opening in the peninsula, was turned by degrees into a 
region not inferior to even the best of those these early 
refugees had left, is a story neither quite pertinent to this 
one of ours nor probably of surpassing interest to readers, 
with nothing but a bald map to stir it. Yet more, it would 
be misleading to suggest that such progress as might be 
implied by the above comparisons had been achieved by 
the period at which this volume closes. Far from it, for 
the great leap forward was made by Upper Canada in the 
half-century between the Napoleon and the American 
(civil) wars. In the waves of immigration that helped to 
accomplish this, the experiences of the U.E. loyalists, 
without those more distressing details arising from a wholly 
untoward situation and peculiar circumstances, repeated 
themselves again and again. The brief picture I have 
ventured to draw of the latter is no fancy one; no one 
familiar with the Canadian bush and Canadian topography 
and with sense enough to grasp the conditions of the eigh- 
teenth century could imagine it to have been otherwise. But 
it may be well to state, what after all is natural enough at 
so recent an epoch, that there is abounding contemporary 
evidence of all these things, small things perhaps and on 
the surface possibly sordid ones, if borne for the most part 
heroically, and by men and women who were the makers of 
Empire, if ever mortals were. In one of Dorchester's 
despatches, after a visit to the Kingston townships, he 
mentions another stimulus to exertion among the loyalists 
which was characteristic and not in the least material. The 



igo THE MAKING OF CANADA 

hitherto desolate shores along the south of the St. Lawrence 
and the lake towards Oswego was now beginning to show 
the clearings of American settlers, either within view or 
within touch of their whilom enemies and very far indeed 
from present friends. Among the latter, says Dorchester, 
there was the keenest desire to show the exchange they had 
made in the best possible light, and if the very map of Nova 
Scotia gave the waggish Whigs of Massachusetts the palsy, 
they were anxious to show these rival pioneers crops of 
wheat such as Massachusetts had never grown, which by 
this time they could very easily do. 

I have sufficiently shown how the reputation of Canadian 
land was already bringing in another kind of immigration 
from over the border, and one that exercised loyal souls 
and anxious officials not a little. Before leaving the largest 
and most typical of the U.E. settlements I must note, 
though it is not quite easy to say precisely how it was 
effected, a certain natural drift of its better born and edu- 
cated members out of backwoods life and into the villages, 
such as Kingston, which grew subsequently into towns. 
For it was the little towns that very early in its history 
governed Upper Canada. Nothing approaching the terri- 
torial influence, though that of course was archaic and 
artificial, which was the prominent feature in Quebec, ever 
arose in Upper Canada, though its foundations, as we have 
seen, were laid in land grants, military and otherwise, 
eminently aristocratic on paper and in intention. Now in 
the old colonies, though to a less degree in those of New 
England, land had been a distinct social power, not merely 
in the case of great landowners of eminently aristocratic 
flavour, such as the Schuylers of New York, the Carrols of 
Maryland, the Carters of Virginia, and many others that 
spring to the mind at once. But all through these pro- 
vinces, north as well as south, there was a less conspicuous 
class, though merged with the other, who owned more land 
and had some pride in owning it and keeping it, and were 
lifted by habit of life and education somewhat above the 



UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 191 

ordinary farmer. Patrick Henry, in a speech quite late in 
life at Richmond, recalled with indignation the days of his 
youth when an ordinary countryman stepped to the side of 
the road and took his hat off if a gentleman rode by. This 
was not confined to the South, though perhaps more empha- 
sised there, and it was one of the things destroyed by the 
Revolution even in Virginia, though it often escapes the 
notice of the many-volumed historian. 

In Upper Canada an aristocratic class arose out of the 
U.E. loyalists destined to be even more politically powerful 
than any equivalent in any of the old provinces had ever 
been, but not on the basis of acres. They became land- 
grabbers, to be sure, with a vengeance, as will doubtless 
transpire later, but only of wild lands and in the rdle 
of speculators, if a man can be said to speculate who con- 
trives to get land for nothing or next to nothing. With all 
its fertility, Upper Canada proved no country for the many- 
acred supervisor of labour. Neither in this fashion nor by 
rents would it support such measure of simple dignity and 
comparative elegance of life as survived above the normal 
rank and file in all parts of the older colonies in varying 
phases. Canada shook off all attempts at ' the country 
gentleman ' from the first, and this from no democratic pre- 
judices, but simply from the deterrent physical conditions. 
It was hoped, no doubt, that the Major and the Captain and 
their social equivalents, with three and five thousand acres 
apiece scattered about among the rank and file, civil and 
military, with their more modest freeholds, would continue 
a rural state of society somewhat on those lines. Class dis- 
tinctions then were marked and anti-republicanism rampant. 
But the reverse happened. The educated and the influential 
wearied for the most part of the struggle, sold their lands 
to those more fitted for the life, and by degrees gathered 
into the centres, acquired all the Government posts and a 
virtual monopoly of the professions, and gradually created 
that small exclusive oligarchy which practically governed 
the province for the whole half-century of its separate 



192 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

existence. Something very like this, too, happened in 
Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. There also the better 
born and more gently nurtured generally flinched, after a 
brief experience, from life in the bush, and rallied to the 
towns to fill the posts of honour, the professions, and the 
higher branches of trade. As regards all these provinces, 
and more particularly that of Upper Canada, they dropped 
almost at once into the lines that no amount of develop- 
ment and prosperity have ever diverted them from. They 
became, in short, countries wholly given over to the one and 
two hundred acre farmer, that being the limit of occupa- 
tion, including the timber preserved on it, which a man and 
his family, speaking broadly, could work with their own 
hands ; the economic ideal after all, of any country and a 
standard easy to maintain where there are always unoccu- 
pied lands at some point or other available for its surplus 
sons. The French Canadian rejected this alternative, as we 
know, and subdivided under the influence of a more sociable 
and less ambitious temperament and a paternal church. 
The Anglo-Canadian wanted elbow-room and land. At 
first he was sometimes land greedy, but a few years of inti- 
macy with the Canadian bush cured him of that ; for, with 
but a tenth probably of his holding cleared and a world of 
toil behind him in the clearing of it, he felt small ambition 
to own a further mile or two of forbidding forest perfectly 
useless except as a possible speculation if he had the money 
to lock up. These forest lands, however, entailed such labour 
in clearing, and there was such an abundance of them, that 
their virgin values, though of course susceptible to the usual 
causes of increase, had strictly modest limits to this, and 
offered little temptation to the genuine settler when he 
understood the situation to overburden himself with. It 
was otherwise for the gentry at headquarters, who had the 
ear or the favour of Government and got grants of thou- 
sands of acres of Crown lands at suspiciously favourable 
figures or at no figures, but on account of some roundabout 
claim, and held them without taxes till the inevitable and 



UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 193 

advancing wave of settlement brought them on the 
market. So a yeoman's country above all things Canada 
became and remained. No landed estates were amassed, 
nor farm added to farm, in the sense understood by the 
phrase. No spark of social prestige attached to land, for all 
this went very early to the towns. There was neither land- 
lordism nor big farming operations ; for where land is cheap 
or free the tenant is an anomaly — certainly a satisfactory 
and substantial tenant is so. Labour too was scarce and 
dear, while the price of produce in such a situation was 
of course low. The higher-class U.E. settler soon dis- 
covered that his talents and energies were thrown away 
in the clearings, modest promise as they held out to such as 
had nothing better to expect. Later on men of the same 
class from England, half-pay officers and the like, with 
characteristic obstinacy and contempt for local experience, 
attempted again and again to deny the inexorable facts of 
Canadian life and play the quasi-country gentleman — 'to 
keep two tables/ as a pertinent old expression of this period 
has it. But the facts, though sufficiently proclaimed by the 
democratic level of the farming community, could not be 
made so logically obvious to strangers of condition, ama- 
teurs too, who could not see why they should not cultivate 
a couple of hundred acres of land with hired labour as else- 
where, enjoy the advantages of at least a cheap table, 
unlimited sport, and retain the habits of polished life and 
even command the deference of their humbler and horny- 
handed neighbours. They did not usually even get their 
respect, for the courting of foredoomed failure, particularly 
when a superior social standard is aimed at, invites ridicule, 
and not always kindly ridicule, among men and women of 
hard lives. For nearly three-quarters of the nineteenth 
century, heedless of the victims and the failures of the past, 
a constant succession, if not a numerous one, of men and 
families of this type flickered on and off the somewhat 
pitiless stage of Canadian rural life, which went steadily on 
its own somewhat hard economic way. But though these 

N 



194 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

obstinate and often courageous souls took but a faint part 
in the making of Canada, they are serviceable here in show- 
ing how it was not made, and the more so as most other 
British colonies owe no little to the agricultural enterprise 
of such people, who in large operations and in a more con- 
genial atmosphere for them have often gathered fame and 
wealth. Plenty of the type have done so in Canada, but 
not by farming, though Upper Canada to-day is in the front 
rank of American agriculture. But it began, for reasons 
that I have endeavoured to make intelligible, as a country 
of small farms, if of large grants. It remained, with a few 
exceptions, one of small profits and still remains such, but to 
the small profits have to be added an hereditary thrift un- 
matched among men of British race at any rate outside 
New England — the outcome perhaps of the struggles and 
self-denials during the time we are dealing with, and 
absorbed by future waves of hard-fisted immigrants. I am 
concerned here, of course, only with general rules. Many 
a U.E. loyalist of gentler breeding beyond doubt had to 
stay in the clearings and emerged, or his children did after 
him, into rustic prosperity, no longer or rarely discernible 
from the ruder mass. Even the later type of gentlefolk, 
civil or military, who in such hundreds sought the woods, 
not of necessity like the first loyalists, but with sanguine 
obstinacy and light-heartedness, did not always suffer vainly 
in purse or person. For many of these too could not get 
out, but remained to face the unexpected as best they 
could and raise a hardier brood, who could handle an ox 
team at a logging bee, swing an axe or cradle wheat with 
any grandson of a backwoods U.E. If the descendants of 
the latter number thousands in every class of life in Canada, 
who shall say how many grandsons and great-grandsons of 
officers, clergymen, squires and the like barely cognisant 
of the fact of their own origin are following the plough to- 
day in the second or third generation of undistinguishable 
membership in the great well-to-do democracy of Ontario 
yeomen ? Most of us know some, while here and there an 
unmistakably significant name betrays others. 



UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 195 

Simcoe met his legislative council of ten at Niagara on 
July 8th, and his first Assembly of sixteen on September 
17, 1792. The provincial capital had not yet been decided 
upon, and for the present there was no difficulty in finding 
accommodation. The province had been divided into four 
districts reckoning from east to west ; the settled portion 
into counties, following for the most part with some want 
of originality the names of the English shires already dupli- 
cated in almost every one of the old colonies, varied with 
compliments to contemporary statesmen some of whom ill 
deserved them. The Briton of that day all over the 
continent had a hapless aversion to the mellifluous Indian 
names. Canada, however, was at least not disfigured by the 
excruciating nomenclature with which an unbridled illiterate 
democracy on its triumphant westward progress branded 
for ever, as a perennial torment to the ear, the inland 
portions of the old and the nearer western States. Primitive 
Canada was satisfied with a ruthless Anglicising of its map 
tempered by perfervid loyalty. But these names at least 
suggest many stately and historic associations, if a trifle 
incongruous when applied to the edge of primitive forests 
or the shores of lonely freshwater seas. Some townships 
in modern Ontario, however, still bear the names of the pet 
spaniels of an early Governor's lady, while Simcoe quite 
rightly commemorated himself both in a Lake Erie coast- 
town and a well-known inland lake. His wife bore the 
Welsh name of Gwillim, still recalled by some adjoining 
townships. But none of these need bring a blush to the 
cheek of the native where confronted with the register of a 
European hotel as must surely Rome and Jonesville, Homer 
and Jerusalem, Higginsville, Cicero, and Pompey, a mere 
stray garland culled from a rich store of such on the neigh- 
bouring frontier of western New York. The four, or a 
little later six, districts proved but temporary. The single 
tier of counties fringing the whole southern water-front of 
the province with a few at the back, which are shown on 
the surveyor-general's map, completed soon after Simcoe's 
departure, exist to-day with many a teeming shire behind 



196 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

them. Three or four small ' Ridings ' — an English designa- 
tion much affected in Upper Canadian topography — of the 
county of Lincoln abutted on the Niagara shore. As we 
have preserved in the archives a full list of the U.E. 
settlers of 1784 in the Kingston districts, with the town- 
ships allotted to them, as well as of those in what became 
the Lower Province, so we have here the same elaborate 
statistics of the men and women and children of Butler's 
Rangers and others who settled the Niagara shore. The 
figures are also those of 1784, and are under the signature 
of the famous partisan John Butler himself, with that of 
Colonel de Peyster, an Anglo- Dutch loyalist who had 
fought with distinction throughout the war. The total 
number was then 620, greatly strengthened beyond a 
doubt in eight years by driblets of new comers ; but the 
great inflow of immigrants awaited the new government, 
its surveys, rules and regulations, with which Simcoe had 
scarcely yet begun to deal. 

It is a little curious that the first elective Assembly of 
Upper Canada, which gathered from far-sundered districts 
in bateaux and canoes, disappointed Simcoe by its demo- 
cratic flavour. Two of the recently arrived M'Donnells 
came of course from Glengarry, whose loyal Highlanders 
had already petitioned the Government for a supply of 
broadswords, while Major Van Alstine secured a seat, also 
James Baby from the Detroit district : otherwise they were 
1 men of one table.' The Governor need not have been 
disturbed. The U.E. aristocracy were not submerged. A 
little patience and they were to control, though not in his 
day, the Legislative Council, which was the only body that 
really much mattered for fifty years, and to make uncon- 
scious puppets of most of Simcoe's successors. There 
were no parties yet, however, and no schisms. The honest 
and capable backwoodsman who paddled down to form 
this Assembly had only some elementary duties to 
perform that called for no political skill and created little 
friction. 



UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 197 

Simcoe was a man of sentiment and imagination, and we 
are told he met his first parliament with due regard to 
ceremony and effect. The Rangers were all there paraded 
in their green uniforms, and a company of redcoats of the 
Fifth Regiment with their fifes and drums. The cannon 
thundered from the neighbouring fort which guarded this 
gateway to the then illimitable west and from the little 
navy of Lake Ontario floating below. It was not much of 
a Parliament House; a building run up some time before 
by the enterprising and ubiquitous order of Freemasons, but 
quite sufficient for the purpose, and Simcoe delivered his 
speech from an extemporised throne. With becoming 
solemnity he told the sixteen homespun-clad members of 
his faithful Commons and the eight members present of his 
Upper House that the great and momentous trusts and 
duties which had been committed to them as representatives 
of the Province infinitely beyond any that till this period 
had been conferred upon any other colony, originated 
from the British nation upon a just consideration of the 
energy and hazard with which the inhabitants had so 
conspicuously supported and defended the Constitution. 
1 The natural advantages,' he went on to say, ' of the Province 
of Upper Canada are inferior to none on this side of the 
Atlantic. There can be no separate interest throughout 
its whole extent. The British form of government has 
prepared the way for its speedy colonisation, and I trust 
that your fostering care will improve the favourable situa- 
tion, and that a numerous and agricultural people will 
speedily take possession of a soil and climate which under 
the British laws and the munificency with which his 
Majesty has granted the lands of the Crown, offer such 
manifest and peculiar encouragements/ One might wish 
a peep into the future could have been vouchsafed to 
Simcoe, for with all his practical activity he felt the 
romance of subduing and peopling the wilderness to the 
full. He was as zealous in roadmaking and bridge-build- 
ing and laying out townships as he had been in soldiering. 



198 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

Nor would any part of Ontario to-day be more calculated 
to startle a Rip Van Winkle from the eighteenth century 
than the shores of the Niagara river, its vast bridges, its 
railroads, hotels, gay villas, neat farms, and general appear- 
ance of being in the heart of an abounding civilisation. All 
that Simcoe, however, saw on that bright August day from 
its mouth was Lake Ontario, unflecked by a single sail, 
shimmering away to a faintly seen coastline on the north 
and spreading eastward to a shoreless and shipless horizon. 
On the former a few shanties lurked amid the still wooded 
shores of the great land-locked harbour, that unconsciously 
marked the site of the future capital of Ontario, about 
which Simcoe and his chief Dorchester were to have some 
passages of arms. Looking south and westward, a strip of 
clearing lined the bank of the river in the direction of the 
great cataract, whose column of mist would then as now 
have been conspicuous above the intervening heights. 
Behind the long narrow belt of settlement lay ten thousand 
square miles of unbroken forest, a vast peninsula, some- 
what the shape of Wales, but nearly twice the size and 
washed like the latter on north, south and west by seas 
though brineless ones. Here the analogy ceases, for no 
mountains nor barrens broke the fertile continuity of the 
better half of Ontario, undulating and well watered, clad 
mainly with forests of hardwood timber. The labour of 
three generations was here to lay open to the sun as fine 
an all-round country as perhaps it ever shone upon, for 
the sons of a hardy race ; a country where the vineyard 
and the wheatfield were to produce of their abundance 
along the same roadside, where waters and pastures were to 
preserve the finer characteristics of the Clydesdale, the 
Shorthorn or the Southdown in a manner not common to 
most parts of North America, and where clear rapid 
streams were to turn the wheels of busy factories whose 
products are now household words in Europe. Simcoe, who 
voyaged busily up the streams and through the dense 
forest trails almost to the further limits of the peninsula, 



UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 199 

open-eyed, a little fussy but full of schemes, guessed 
something perhaps of its agricultural and industrial future. 
He was not quite happy, however, in his prognostications, 
foreseeing a country of indigo, tobacco, hemp and flax, 
though primitive needs may partially account for his 
thoughts running on such products or his long campaigning 
in the Southern colonies with Cornwallis. Courts of 
Common Pleas and Quarter Sessions had been for some 
time established by the Quebec Government and had 
worked smoothly. Simcoe now had his own Crown officers, 
Judges Powell and Osgoode, the latter name so conspicu- 
ously immortalised in the great Toronto law-buildings. 
The counties had already been laid out for electoral pur- 
poses, and in order, as Simcoe writes to Dundas, ' to promote 
aristocracy,' he created county lieutenants with powers to 
make magistrates and militia officers ; for a militia organisa- 
tion was not a vague precautionary measure in the Canada 
of those days. An Indian war was raging just south of the 
line, and complications with the United States as well as with 
France were possible at any moment. The reader will hardly 
care to know the measures defeated or carried in this first 
provincial session. They were of an ordinary and necessary 
kind. One cause of anxiety, however, among these earlier 
settlers was the legitimacy of their marriages, which was 
now called in question. At that time under the law of 
England an Anglican clergyman was an indispensable 
accessory and scarcely any had been available. Majors, 
captains and magistrates had united most of the happy 
couples west of Montreal for the last ten years, and such 
doubts got abroad as to the validity of the knot thus 
tied that retrospective legislation to settle the matter was 
called for. There were loyalist refugees even in London too 
waiting to come to Upper Canada, one hundred and eighty 
souls in all, wanting everything, writes Dr. Peters, but 
' hunger, nakedness and cold.' They had been pressing their 
claims at the Board of Settlement, and obviously failed in 
many cases to make them good, and were now 'perishing 



200 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

under poverty and naked distress.' Simcoe and Dorchester, 
his superior, came in conflict early though they never met. 
This friction which proved chronic, though it had fortunately 
no effect beyond the irritation it caused to the principals 
themselves, has always seemed historically a jarring note. 
For they were the two best Governors in their widely 
different ways who ever went to Canada in the period when 
Governors counted for much. In Dorchester's absence 
and afterwards, the enthusiastic Simcoe bombarded with 
despatches not only the Home Government, but also 
Hammond, the British representative accredited to the 
U.S. Government. Dundas, at Whitehall, was obviously 
bored at times by this volubility. In answer to a request 
of Simcoe's that the country should be advertised in 
England, the minister replies that nothing is more offensive 
to their notions than to make the emigration of their subjects 
a professed object of government : on the contrary, steps 
would be taken to stop emigration from Great Britain, but it 
is wished that those who do go should settle in the colonies, 
and much more that illustrates the current views on 
colonies. Hammond gives Simcoe all the doings and pro- 
spective doings of the Americans. How St. Clair's defeat 
by the Indians and resignation has brought about the 
appointment of Anthony Wayne, the most active and 
enterprising officer in the American service. ( He is just 
the man,' writes Hammond, ' to attack the posts, backed as 
he would be by a strong public opinion, in the middle and 
southern States.' When Dorchester came back he was not 
overpleased with this voluminous correspondence that still 
continued to flow from a Lieutenant-Governor under his 
authority. They disagreed about other things too, the site 
of the capital of the new province for one, and the selection 
of its principal naval harbour for another. Simcoe, who 
made long expeditions through the wilderness, had his eye 
on the site now occupied by London, Ontario, which he 
himself thus prematurely named with the infelicitous mania 
for tautology of his generation, quite regardless of future 



UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 201 

inconvenience. Its central and secure inland situation on 
the river La Tranche which, of course, he rechristened 
the Thames, took his fancy. Toronto he designed for the 
naval harbour of the Lake fleet, then consisting of about a 
dozen armed sloops and schooners. Dorchester, however, 
decided for Toronto as the capital and Kingston for the 
naval harbour. Simcoe thought building barracks and 
quartering troops in a wilderness locality was the best way 
to encourage a town. Dorchester held very strongly that 
these should grow naturally on spots that nature and cir- 
cumstances intended for towns, and Dorchester as Governor- 
in-Chief had his way. The conflicting opinions and prog- 
nostications of even able Governors are not of the first 
importance to my story, but they are not without interest 
to those face to face with the remote results of such dis- 
cussions. London to-day is a pleasant country town of 
10,000 souls, and its name is therefore not often a cause 
of confusion, but it might have been. Toronto is about the 
size that Bristol was when Simcoe reluctantly hauled up 
his flag at ' Muddy little York,' the nucleus of the present 
capital. 

But all this time, while Governor Simcoe and his staff, 
civil and military, were busy with the infant settlements of 
the province, the shadow of an invasion lay heavy upon the 
whole of Canada. The French Revolution had been hailed 
with universal joy in the United States. As it progressed 
in licence the Federal party of Washington and Hamilton 
cooled considerably, while the fervour of the Jeffersonian 
Republicans, with their chief strength in the South, showed 
no abatement. The United States Government under the 
new constitution had come into being in 1789. The first 
symptoms of that sectional cleavage which was to explode in 
the sanguinary civil war of seventy years later had already 
begun to show themselves. North and South were respec- 
tively the prevailing elements in opposite parties. The 
former tended towards conservatism, centralised authority, 
dignity and restraint in foreign politics and sound finance, 



202 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

combined with a qualified friendliness towards Great Britain. 
The latter headed by Jefferson, an ultra-Gallophile, and to- 
gether with certain other notable Virginians, fanatical in 
their hatred of Great Britain, was, with the exception of a 
few such groups, the more illiterate party. As regards an 
understanding of foreign nations, save for its perfervid leader 
it was prodigiously ignorant from top to bottom and conse- 
quently emotional, reckless, and dangerous to the peace of 
its own and other countries. Its domestic policy favoured 
the individual liberty of each State as against the Federal 
power. Into Charleston, one of the hotbeds of this party, 
was precipitated in the year 1793, soon after the French 
Republic had declared war against Great Britain and 
Holland, the most grotesque and offensive minister ever 
credited to a foreign court, the ridiculous Genet. Washing- 
ton had recently issued a proclamation enjoining a friendly 
and impartial conduct towards the belligerent Powers. Genet 
had come to stir up strife against Great Britain, which was 
quite legitimate, but he hopelessly overdid his part, though 
the agents who acted under him, particularly in Canada, 
caused infinite trouble. The Southerners, however, were 
delighted with this preposterous mountebank. All the way 
to Philadelphia they feted him, and even dragged his chariot 
in places over the rough and rutty roads. Planters and 
farmers, who had never felt, nor their fathers before them 
been in a situation to feel, even a breath of the social miseries 
and feudal tyrannies that Genet's government had destroyed 
or even to know what they meant ; men whose simple easy 
lot had been further ameliorated by the forced labour of 
300,000 negro slaves, cut capers in caps of liberty, and 
dropped the sane courtesies of American life for the most 
grotesque phraseology of Parisian Sans Culottes. 

Through North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland the 
feather-headed Frenchman enjoyed the frenzies of these 
demented Anglo-Saxons, * not ten of whom,' says one 
historian of the period, 'could have pronounced a single 
French sentence with approximate correctness to save them- 



UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 203 

selves from being hanged.' He fitted out privateers at 
Charleston manned by American seamen, which captured 
unsuspecting British craft, and pursued generally a course 
of licence which very soon brought him into conflict with 
Hammond. Jefferson, the indiscriminating admirer of 
everything French, however extravagant, watched Genet's 
triumphant career with something more than complacency — 
an attitude which he had soon good reason to reconsider, 
for he was in the cabinet. Nor should it be forgotten that 
the Americans regarded the French Revolution, and not 
without justice, far different though the causes were which 
provoked it, as in some sort inspired by their own success- 
ful struggle. Imitation we are told is the sincerest form 
of flattery, and to this conviction the exuberance of the 
American mobs and country people may no doubt be in 
great part attributed. The first chill Genet received was on 
encountering Washington. That great man had already 
taken his measure, and a personal interview did not enlarge 
it. We have no concern here with the annoyance and 
anxiety Genet caused to the President, to Hamilton, the 
Federal party, and even in the end to their opponents. His 
privateers were ordered out of American waters, and soon 
afterwards the French Government was requested to recall 
him, which it did, or rather suspended him, though not 
before he had contrived to insult and disgust every member 
of the ministry from the President downwards even to 
his friend Jefferson. ' Citizen ' Genet, however, continued 
to be for some time the idol of shouting mobs, and did a 
great deal of mischief in the few months he was at large. 
His mission, at least as interpreted by himself, was to 
involve the Americans in a war with Great Britain and to 
spread disaffection in Canada, where his agents became 
extremely busy. This too was quite legitimate from his 
point of view, but it may be noted that he was afraid to 
return to France, and lived for the rest of a long life in 
America with an American wife, in obscurity. 

The Jacobin views of French Republicans may or may 



204 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

not have been a better card to play on that inscrutable 
being, the Canadian habitant, than the misinterpreted clauses 
of the Quebec Act, but they proved alluring to a most 
disquieting degree. It was Frenchmen this time appealing 
to Frenchmen, and not now offering them merely the dis- 
credited old regime with modifications, but a Utopia in 
which everything was to be had for nothing, and all dues, 
taxes, and suchlike vexations to be swept away. Among 
the increasing class of bourgeois in Lower Canada it would 
have been strange if the furore of the French Revolution had 
not made some converts ready to work with Genet's agents 
at the corruption of the peasantry. Some passing disputes 
between the seigniors and their tenants formed an opportune 
and serviceable weapon for the preachers of sedition. 
Liability to service in the militia was another fact inevitable 
to Canadian life that it did not need much oratory to convert 
into a grievance. It mattered little that the habitant had 
now got practically everything his simple soul could desire 
short of actually looting his neighbours, which was not 
natural to his disposition — even a vote, though history is 
silent as to his earlier electioneering ardour. But it is 
enough that sedition was rife among a certain small class 
in the towns, and chiefly, as usual in Montreal, as well as 
through an unknown proportion of the parishes. This 
would seem to have been fermenting all through 1793, the 
year of the execution of the French King, of the declaration 
of war against England and Spain, and of the machinations 
of Genet. These continued under his successor Fauchet 
through the next year, when Monk, the Attorney-General 
of the Province, who had been taking depositions through- 
out them, reported to Dorchester that a majority of the 
parishes were corrupted. The Governor on looking over 
his long career in Canada and his efforts on behalf of this 
same habitant, may well have despaired of him. In 1793 
he writes regarding the condition of North America to 
Dundas, then Minister for the Colonies : ' Soon after my 
return to America I perceived a very different spirit animat- 



UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 205 

ing the United States, much heat and enmity, extraordinary- 
exertions, some open, some covert, to inflame the passions 
of the people, all things moving as by French impulse 
rapidly towards hostilities, and the King's government 
of Lower Canada in danger of being overwhelmed, so that 
I considered a rupture as being inevitable. Their old State 
policy on all occasions to impress on the people of the 
United States the rank injustice and unfairness of our 
procedures had already prepared their minds, so that con- 
sidering recent events as of the desired magnitude, they 
eagerly joined their Jacobin friends. Some not aware to 
what extremes it might lead them, others willing to run 
all lengths, both desirous to profit by the supposed em- 
barrassment of our affairs, and of opinion that we dare not 
resist. Private inclination and public duty apart, it would 
be folly in the extreme for any Commander-in-Chief, cir- 
cumstanced as I find myself here, without troops, without 
authority, amidst a people barely not in arms against the 
King, of his own accord to provoke hostility or to begin 
(as Mr. Secretary Randolph is pleased to call it) hostility 
itself: 

1 The contempt with which this country is treated by the 
United States sufficiently evinces their knowledge of our 
own impotent condition, and that we are abandoned to 
our own feeble efforts for our own preservation, and even 
these they seem to expect and require we should not 
employ.' 

The allusion to Randolph's phrase is concerned with a 
speech Dorchester had just made to a deputation of the 
Miami Indians, who had complained to him of the utter 
disregard of the Americans for the boundary south of Lake 
Erie, which had been recognised upon all sides as still 
defining the territory of their kindred and the other tribes 
still occupying that country. The British theory, and the 
one nominally held by the Americans themselves, main- 
tained that the country north of the Ohio, which before the 
war had been recognised Indian ground, was so still. 



206 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

Nothing had been said or done to invalidate their ancient 
claims. In replying to this deputation the Governor had 
concluded : ' I have waited long, but have not yet received 
one word of satisfaction from the Americans, and from what 
I can learn of their conduct towards the Indians I should 
not be surprised if the English were at war with them during 
the present year, and then a line must be drawn by the 
warriors. What further can I say to you ? You are a 
witness that for our part we have acted in the most peaceful 
manner, and borne the language and conduct of the people 
of the United States with patience, but I believe our patience 
is almost exhausted.' These words, addressed in a private 
interview to half a dozen Indians, were caught up by the 
Jacobins in Montreal and forwarded to the press of the 
United States, which blazed it everywhere abroad as an 
evidence of a British desire to bring about a war. American 
writers to this day either perpetuate the cry, or quote it 
without comment. If they had read the tedious and pro- 
tracted correspondence between the Canadian governments 
and the officers at the frontier forts and Indian agents, they 
would see how baseless were such accusations. That the 
British Canadians had not felt some satisfaction at St. 
Clair's crushing defeat would be to write them down as less 
than human. But to suppose them anxious, in a situation 
so precarious as theirs, to invite an attack from the United 
States, backed by France and the Jacobins of Lower 
Canada, would be to suppose all concerned as persons 
wearied of life, of liberty, of employment, and even of 
patriotism. The whole Indian difficulty lay in a nutshell, 
and had nothing whatever to do with the British of the 
posts who have been persistently and monotonously ac- 
cused of feeding the struggle. It is an accusation based 
wholly, I believe, on mere inference, from the peculiar 
situation of the western British, objects of hatred as they 
were to the American filibusters and to most Americans of 
that day, and at the same time at peace themselves with 
the Indians. Nothing they could have done would have 



UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 207 

saved them from the accusations that their mere presence 
in such a situation made inevitable at a moment when 
passions ran high, and accuracy, never a virtue of western 
borderers, at a discount. 

A scholarly and living American historian first quotes 
Washington on the cause of the troubles to this effect : 
1 Land-jobbing, intermeddling of States and disorderly con- 
duct of the borderers, who were indifferent to the killing of 
an Indian are, in my opinion, the great obstacles in the way 
of success. Yet these very men, who shot Indians at sight 
and plundered them of their lands as well as the States 
concerned, were the first to cry out for aid when war, 
brought by their own violation of the treaties of the United 
States, was upon them/ Having stated an obvious truism 
through the mouth of Washington himself, the author seems 
doubtful if shooting Indians on sight and seizing their lands 
were sufficiently justifiable provocation to a warlike and high- 
spirited race ! Or it would seem rather as if he suddenly 
remembered the properly constituted reader looking for 
the conventional pound of British flesh, but at the same 
time forgot to re-write what he had already set down ; for 
he adds a rider that the Indians were spurred on by 
England in a way ' difficult to understand at the present 
day.' The average modern, one might think, would see 
nothing incomprehensible in advising an Indian, if advice 
were needed, to resist men whose object was to shoot him 
on sight and steal his land ! With regard to the persis- 
tent intrigues attributed to the British Governor and the 
officials of Canada, one must conclude that the redundant 
correspondence through all these years between these 
and the officers of the western posts preserved in the 
archives has never been perused by American writers on 
this period. Nay, more than this, whether they do or do 
not know of it, they never allude to the solemn Treaty of 
Fort M'Intosh in 1785 with the Delawares and Wyandottes, 
recognising most of the country north of the Ohio to Lake 
Erie as theirs, and stating in the fifth article that ' if any 



208 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

citizen of the United States shall attempt to settle on their 
land, they may punish him as they please.' 

But war seemed imminent, and in 1794 Dorchester in- 
structed Simcoe to rebuild one of their former outposts on 
the Maumee, about fifteen miles south of Lake Erie, which 
might be in a manner regarded as one of the treaty posts. 
It had been abandoned as no longer necessary to the fur 
trade, but was now reoccupied as vital to the safety of 
Detroit, ' a poor fort with a nominal garrison.' The 
energetic Simcoe saw to this himself, and installed there 
Major Campbell with about 120 men of the 24th Regiment 
in the following summer, amid the outcry of the filibusters 
and landgrabbers from Kentucky sounding loud through all 
the States. Wayne with about 4000 men was now pressing 
on to meet the Indians, who could only muster about a 
third of that number and, as ill luck had it, the final battle 
took place almost under the guns of the little British post. 
' Old Anthony ' was a cautious and admirable soldier and 
took no chances. The Indians were utterly broken, and 
victorious Kentucky horsemen galloped up in a threatening 
fashion to the fort. Campbell turned his guns upon them, 
and lit his matches. It was an anxious moment. A single 
shot and the flame of war would have blazed forth, but the 
borderers fortunately wheeled about. The crisis was not 
over, however, for there were some wordy passages between 
Wayne and Campbell. The former required that the Major 
should evacuate the fort, a demand that was promptly 
refused. Wayne, however, was a cool-headed soldier, and 
a servant of the government, and the government was by 
no means abreast of the inflamed opinion of its excitable 
public. The controlling spirits at the moment were 
fortunately neither landgrabbers, nor Kentucky riflemen, 
nor Southern planters with long outstanding debts to 
British merchants, nor Francophile philosophers who had 
never smelt powder, nor Boston demagogues masquerading 
in Phrygian caps. Washington was still in his second term, 
and Alexander Hamilton, as a statesman a yet greater man, 



UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 209 

and powerful on the side of sanity, was at the zenith of his 
fame. To these men and their supporters, this exuberance 
of Franco-mania was altogether distasteful. They mis- 
trusted the new policy of France, and misliked its represen- 
tatives, to say nothing of the cavalier treatment by that 
country of American ships and even American envoys. 
Gratitude to the France of another day had not made them 
forget that they were after all Britons, not Frenchmen, that 
the people for whose dubious destiny they were responsible 
were by blood and tongue, and every instinct that guided 
their political and domestic life, British and not French. 
Nay more, they were further removed from the latter than 
even the English of Britain, who at least knew something of 
their neighbours. 

To the Federal administration, though keenly jealous 
of their nascent national dignity, which the French 
Republic for that matter was showing scant respect 
for, the task of welding together thirteen States full of the 
traditional prejudices of nearly two centuries, and making 
a nation of them, seemed a domestic problem altogether 
sufficient for the moment. Jay had in fact already been 
sent to England to negotiate the treaty which, when accom- 
plished, raised such an uproar among the noisier party in 
the United States, and averted war for the time at any rate, 
though ultimately as we know, the Republicans, as the 
democratic or Jeffersonian party were then styled, had their 
way. At that moment, when the fires of American adven- 
ture were relit in France, Canada might probably have been 
overwhelmed. It may be doubted, however, if the Federal 
leaders, so keenly alive to their domestic difficulties, con- 
templated with equanimity the prospect of yet another 
State, rife with something more than fractious individualism. 
Fifteen or twenty thousand U.E. loyalists of military 
habit and incurable hatred rankling in their hearts, 
together with a hundred and twenty thousand French 
Catholics wedded to every habit of life and faith that the 
American abhorred and scorned, and accustomed to political 

O 



210 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

indulgence, would probably give infinite trouble. Yet 
more, the aggressiveness of the new French regime caused 
many to reflect that Great Britain as a neighbour might, 
after all, have her uses, while no sane American could have 
tolerated the prospect of France on the St. Lawrence. 

Authority during the years 1793-4 in the United States was 
in inverse ratio to noise. The latter was so great that no 
one in Canada imagined that war could possibly be averted. 
There had been a narrow escape at the Maumee fort. 
But Washington's government was steadily though quietly 
working towards a peaceful settlement of all outstanding 
difficulties, for too conspicuous efforts would have stirred 
the anti-British multitude to yet greater frenzy. As we 
have seen, Jay, their envoy-extraordinary, was already at 
St. James's and a comprehensive treaty was ultimately 
negotiated between the Powers. It had a bare majority 
in the Lower House, North and South voting almost solid 
against each other. Samuel Adams, one of the few 
prominent Jeffersonian Northerners and then Governor of 
Massachusetts being on the losing side, characteristically 
suggested changing the Constitution of the United States ! 
His oratory too was characteristic of his party, which 
had denounced the generous measures of the British 
Government towards the French in the Quebec Act of 
1774 as 'so barbarously and flagrantly unjust that the 
annals of Constantinople might be searched in vain for a 
parallel.' After the advent of the American Republic, how- 
ever, he had assured an audience that ' Godlike virtue 
shall blazon our hemisphere until time shall be no more.' 
But flowers of speech were ineffective against the American 
Constitution, and these exuberant souls discovered what 
many future malcontents were to discover, namely that it 
was to prove the most unyielding instrument and in many 
respects the most monumental bulwark of Conservatism 
that in a free country ever confronted either the single- 
minded reformer or the featherheaded demagogue. The 
annoyance which greeted an understanding with Great 



UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 211 

Britain in France was natural, as that country had 
begun to treat the United States almost as a dependency. 
The storm of abuse and virulence that it awakened in the 
latter country was also inevitable, in view of the passions 
into which a moiety of Americans of that generation 
lashed themselves or could be lashed. Prior to the 
Revolution the States now most vociferous were on the 
whole quiet, easy-going, rather amiable communities, 
polite even in their refusals to vote governors' salaries or 
men and money for defending their borders against the 
French or Indians. But the War of Independence would 
seem to have set their nerves permanently on edge and 
changed their corporate natures, though the froth within 
their borders brought up to the surface by the struggle 
must not be overlooked. Whichever side had literally 
drawn first blood, it was they after all and in actual fact who 
had challenged the mother-country to a trial of arms and 
won with the help of the French a well-merited but rather 
unexpected triumph, thereby justly earning the admiration 
of the civilised world and a goodly store of laurels besides. 
They had humiliated Great Britain, whose initial offences 
in the eyes of other nations would hardly have been 
detected under a microscope. One might reasonably have 
looked for hatred and virulence on the side of the proud 
and vanquished mother. As a government and a nation, 
however, she behaved in the trying hour of surrender and 
afterwards with considerable dignity and good feeling, nor 
as yet at any rate had there been any manifestation in 
a form that could be called representative of a less correct 
attitude. Americans were neither hooted nor insulted in 
the streets of London, though such outburts, particularly 
in view of the treatment of the loyalists, would have been 
conceivable. But English envoys, officers and others who 
had to traverse the United States even ten years after the 
peace, enjoyed no such immunity from the populace. To 
be a good loser is a severe test, and one that the Briton 
perhaps excels at. It cannot be said that the most 



212 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

articulate portion of the American people of this period 
were even good winners. No amount of laboured ex- 
planation set forth by American historians, now mostly- 
endowed with a praiseworthy sense of equity and con- 
scious to a man that explanation is needed, seems to 
mitigate the situation. What the temper of the majority 
would have been under adverse conditions is an interest- 
ing speculation. It is in fact about the best argument 
in favour of that overwhelming pressure of English opinion 
which terminated the war. If the chastened King, how- 
ever, and his ministers behaved like gentlemen in their 
hour of humiliation, so did Washington and his government 
though loaded with abuse, while France, on the other hand, 
proceeded to such amazing insults that liberty caps 
disappeared and Gallophilism for the moment lost some- 
thing of its fervour. Yet the strange experience has been 
permitted to the present writer in times now past of 
listening to the grandsons and great-grandsons of the very 
pillars of that bitterly anti-British faction cursing with a 
fervour allayed in some cases by time, in some only by 
death, the triumphant moment when they parted company 
with King George. And this too not here and there, nor 
now and then, but day in and day out and year after year 
and in the very ancient stronghold itself of the Jeffersons 
and the Madisons, the Randolphs and the Henrys ; nay, 
sometimes with men actually of their blood. The Yankee- 
phobia of the close of the third quarter of the nineteenth 
century was even more violent, but then it was natural and 
logical ; the Anglophobia which kept Canada for twenty 
years more or less on the strain, was neither. The 
Americans had deliberately placed themselves outside the 
British family circle, and could now trade where and with 
whom they pleased, yet they were sore and angry because 
they had no longer the trading privileges of the British 
connection. As an independent Power too, they found 
themselves like every other one without a strong navy 
inconvenienced and put upon in the struggle between the 



UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 213 

two great maritime nations, whereas in former days they 
had sailed in safety beneath the flag of England. These 
annoyances, however, were felt far more in New England, 
whose people for the most part took a broader grasp of 
the world's politics and had practically buried the hatchet. 



214 THE MAKING OF CANADA 



CHAPTER IX 

DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 

My remarks in the last chapter on the strained and 
uneasy relations between Great Britain and the United 
States carried us on to Jay's treaty of 1795, leaving the 
anxious years immediately preceding it not fully disposed 
of as regards some matters which demand notice for a 
proper appreciation of the condition of Canada. Dor- 
chester in opening the second session of the Lower 
Canadian Parliament in November 1793 had laid stress on 
the inadequate defences of the country against foreign 
aggression. All kinds of people, the very reverse of 
U.E. loyalists and not always of wholly agricultural 
intention, were coming into the province, and an alien act 
was passed as a precaution against undesirables, also a 
militia bill under the prospect of invasion. In regard to 
the first, the Eastern Townships were now filling up, mainly 
from Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut and New 
York. To each township (thirty-six square miles) granted 
by the Government a man of character and position known 
as a ' leader ' was appointed, and to him fell the duty of 
introducing settlers, all of whom had to take an oath of 
fealty to the Crown. Though not U.E. loyalists, the 
founders of this important British wedge thrust northward 
from the American frontier into Lower Canada were 
generally men of experience, quality and substance, and 
proved as good subjects as the military loyalists of 
Ontario, without the exuberant and picturesque features 
of the others' patriotism. Hemmed in between the States 
on one side and French Canadians on the other, though 



DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 215 

with ample elbow-room to develop a large, powerful and 
prosperous community, they progressed along slightly 
different lines from their contemporaries of Upper Canada. 
They might be almost said to represent to-day a third 
strain of Anglo-Canadian, alongside of those of the Mari- 
time Provinces and Ontario respectively. Less than a 
century later, spreading for fifty miles over hill and 
valley around the flourishing towns of Sherbrooke, Rich- 
mond, and lesser centres, the ' Townships ' were at their 
zenith. The opening of the north-west, however, and some 
other causes in later days carried away the flower of their 
youth, while their French neighbours remained, multiplied, 
and bought the vacated farms to an extent that has greatly 
altered the original character of the country. The alien 
act now provided for a critical examination of every man 
who entered Canada either by land or sea. In cases of 
treason or suspicion of it the Habeas Corpus Act could be 
suspended, while 'assemblages of people, seditious dis- 
courses and false news ' were to be carefully watched and 
if necessary suppressed with a firm hand. 

Dorchester's legislation at Quebec went peaceably for- 
ward. The French majority in the House were in part 
seigniors and the remainder merchants, notaries and 
doctors. Matters of judicature and excise were dealt with, 
in the course of which it transpires that the net revenue of 
the province is about two-fifths of the expenditure, the 
deficit being made up by the Crown, to whom the sale of 
lands and fees on land grants were already bringing in sub- 
stantial returns. Even now had the power of the provincial 
purse been wholly with the Assembly, it is easy to see what 
an ineffective lever — the only one they had for enforcing 
their will on the nominated executive — it would have proved 
and did prove. But outside conditions were for the present 
so serious that internal affairs excited comparatively small 
interest. In mustering the militia the British, writes Doi- 
chester to his Government, came out with alacrity, but the 
spirit of the rank and file of the French was, with few ex- 



216 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

ceptions, quite the reverse — a fact due as often, in the 
Governor's opinion, to long cessation from soldiering as to 
disloyalty. ' A people so disused to military service for 
twenty-seven years do not willingly take up the firelock and 
march to the frontier when their passions are not strongly 
agitated.' The two chief causes of complaint, he writes in 
the same letter, are the expense, as it seemed to the 
habitants, of litigation, which always was and still is with 
them a popular pastime, and the exactions of the seigniors. 
With the rise of land and brisk demand for it going on out- 
side the seigniories, owners of the latter were no doubt 
occasionally tempted to raise rents by this and by the very 
reluctance of the habitant to move, while a few of them, 
British purchasers, were inclined to regard themselves too 
exclusively in the light of landlords. Against this there 
was now no opportunity for appeal, though one was in- 
stituted later. But in the French regime the Intendant had 
acted as a kind of informal but quite autocratic land court, 
holding the seignior as in some sort trustee for the Crown, 
and quite prepared to displace him should he give just cause 
for so doing. Probably this particular grievance was now 
in part manufactured under the stimulus of French and 
American intriguers, but the state of the province was so 
alarming that the methods by which it was made so are not 
of the first consequence. The spread of sedition, not now, 
as had been the case in '75, most active about and to the 
south of Montreal, but showing itself in parishes close to 
Quebec like Charlebourg, Beauport, and the Island of Orleans, 
grew so formidable that prominent men of both nationalities 
sank their minor differences and formed societies for the 
public safety. Attorney-General Monk, shortly afterwards 
Chief-Justice, who was active in forming these associations, 
wrote freely to the Home Government on the state of the 
country. In regard to the militia, he says there seemed 
small hope of substantial assistance from the new subjects. 
c Threats are used by the dissatisfied against those who 
would be loyal, and it is astonishing to find the same 



DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 217 

savagery exhibited here as in France in so short a period of 
corruption. Blood-alliances do not check the menaces 
against the non-complying peasants. These threats include 
the burning of houses, decapitation and carrying heads on 
poles, as the depositions show, besides throwing off all 
regard for religion. Many Canadians who in '75 had com- 
mitted themselves, or thought they had, too deeply to 
venture on returning, remained in the United States and 
kept up a correspondence with their friends. These it 
appears now enrolled themselves among the other emissaries 
who secretly patrolled Canada in the interests of revolt. 
An address was read at church doors and widely circulated, 
1 From the Free French to their brothers in Canada,' urging 
them to follow the example of France and the United 
States and upset a throne ' so long the seat of hypocrisy 
and imposture, despotism, greed and cruelty. Canadians, 
arm yourselves, call your friends the Indians to your assist- 
ance, count on the sympathy of your neighbours and of the 
French. 5 The habitants having demolished most of the 
upper class, nearly all that is to say who could read or write, 
were then invited to form an ' Independent nation in league 
with France and the United States.' A pretty and work- 
able prospect ! incidentally suggestive of the fact that the 
Aliens and company with their five thousand Green Mountain 
riflemen would have been the nearest neighbours of this 
Utopia, and apparently ready to fight either Great Britain 
or the United States, whichever seemed for the moment the 
least formidable or offered the lowest terms ; admirable 
makers of Empire, Puritan-bred, hardy, indomitable, money- 
making, narrow-minded and self-obsessed, with an in- 
stinctive hatred of an alien race and creed. From these 
and their kindred communities, whether for the moment as 
a ' neighbouring nation ' or as the inevitable ' fellow-citizen,' 
the French Canadian and his thousand archaic prejudices 
would have got scant measure indeed. It may also be 
remembered that a generation had now grown up in the 
parishes who knew nothing of war and had little taste for it. 



218 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

Dorchester was no mere provincial governor, concerning 
himself only with the administration and defence of his own 
colony. He took an abiding interest in the various move- 
ments which accompanied the difficult task of consolidating 
the Union of the United States, and had correspondents in 
many quarters of that country whose letters concerning the 
hopes and fears and conflicting opinions of different locali- 
ties are deeply interesting, and make somewhat strange 
reading nowadays. As the pioneers on the north-west 
frontier were pressing forward at any cost across the 
old Indian boundary of the Ohio, so those in the south- 
west were chafing at the presence of Spain on the Mississippi, 
for that Power now controlled the navigation of the great 
river to its mouth, a fact which goaded the Americans, 
advancing through the spacious new territory of Kentucky, 
to exasperation. No idea that Spain having been in the 
south-west for ages had prior rights, seems to have occurred 
to the exuberant Kentuckian, if one may judge by his 
utterances, nor indeed is the concession always obvious on 
the pages of the modern writer. All sorts of schemes were 
in the air. One party was for playing the prodigal son to 
Great Britain if she would seize the Mississippi and make it 
the fatted calf. Others were for attacking the Spaniards at 
all costs, and others again for uniting with them and 
seceding from the States. And it was all so absolutely 
natural and human in a second generation of pioneers, with 
the vast potentialities of the west and south-west spread so 
temptingly before their eyes, and themselves mostly unen- 
cumbered by any national feeling to speak of, or attachment 
to anything particular but good land, personal liberty, and 
dollars. George Rogers Clarke had actually proposed to 
raise five thousand men on the Ohio and attack the Spanish 
settlements in the Illinois and thence descend the river on 
the rest of Louisiana. Baron de Carondelet, Spanish 
governor of that province, sent Indian messengers through 
the woods to Simcoe, proposing that they should unite in 
checking the irrepressible American frontier-men. It was 



DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 219 

to the interest of England, he wrote, that the Illinois should 
be in Spanish hands, while for himself he should repel force 
by force if it was attacked. The Vermonters were obviously- 
divided among themselves, the disaffected and articulate 
party blowing hot and cold by turns towards Great Britain 
as represented by Canada, and incidentally committing all 
sorts of small outrages against the British posts on Lake 
Champlain, which their government disavowed. Next we 
find the Aliens and Governor Chittenden professing to 
represent their people and making overtures to Simcoe for 
annexation ; while finally Ira Allen, on board a ship sailing 
out of Ostend with 20,000 stand of arms and artillery, is 
captured and brought into Portsmouth in 1796. There he 
declared, with an overstrained confidence in British ignor- 
ance of American statistics, that this formidable consignment 
was intended for the equipment of the Vermont militia ! 
Who were to carry all these rifles and man these batteries 
remains to this day a mystery. But as British regiments 
did so eventually and Jay's treaty came into operation, it 
does not much matter whether or no they were originally 
intended for French Canadian habitants. Now at last all 
immediate fear from the American side was allayed, and 
the only clause in the treaty that concerns Canada, the 
evacuation of the posts at Oswego, Niagara, Detroit, 
the Sault - St. - Marie, Michillimacknack and elsewhere, 
was accomplished. The small British garrisons, with 
joy and thanksgiving in most cases we may be sure, 
marched out and the Americans marched in. Once 
again after thirty years the French and half-breed 
traders of the far west saw the flag of a mighty nation 
solemnly hauled down and another run up and unfurled 
to the lake breezes in its place, this time to stay there. 
The great Michigan peninsular and all the country south 
and beyond the lakes passed out of Canadian influence, 
as a dozen years before it had passed out of Canadian 
dominion. 

The fur trade was still by far the chief commercial asset 



220 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

of Canada. The boundary of the Hudson's Bay Company, 
that great corporation which I need hardly say governed 
itself, in a sphere aloof and remote from the other provinces, 
lay far to the north, crossing the wooded wilderness from the 
bay to the prairie wilderness, which began where their 
station at Fort Garry, the modern Winnipeg, now stands. 
Save for the sieges and sea fights waged on those lonely 
seas by the famous d'Ibervilles just a century previously, by 
which the Company's domain was transferred to France, to 
be returned at the Peace of Ryswick a year or so later, 
nothing had disturbed the profitable repose of their vast and 
silent Empire save when the voice of the shareholder in 
London had been pitched betimes in a louder key. At 
the period of the founding of Upper Canada their posts 
and those of the old French traders had been pushed west- 
ward almost to within sight of the Rocky Mountains. Fort 
Edmonton, now as a rising city the latest Mecca of the 
modern agricultural emigrant, had been erected in the very 
year of Jay's treaty, while their explorers had actually 
camped on the banks of the Peace River, a district even still 
far beyond the limits of north-western settlement. For in 
the time of Governor Haldimand, the British fur-trading 
houses of Montreal had emerged from that struggling 
embryonic condition so contemptuously described by 
Governor Murray soon after the cession of Canada, and 
half a dozen strong firms led by the Frobishers formed 
themselves, for economic reasons readily conceivable, into a 
corporation known as the North- West Company, or more 
familiarly in Canadian story, as the Nor'-Westers. The old 
French trade, as the reader may be incidentally reminded, 
had been virtually the perquisite of the French Crown, and 
had left no strong private houses to carry on their business 
under the British flag. The threads had been picked up by 
the British, or let us say at once by the Scots, for most of 
the incorporated firms bore Highland names. The Nor'- 
Westers flourished exceedingly and pushed their forts 
through the wilderness with amazing vigour. Following up 



DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 221 

the long course of the Ottawa and away up the northern 
shores of Lake Superior, they planted their lonely stations. 
Fort William, the present well-known port at the head of 
the great lake, where the latter's traffic now meets the 
Canadian Pacific railroad, they had their chief back-country 
depot. Already they had crossed the Rocky Mountains, 
descended the Fraser River, and were seated on the Pacific 
slope. Their connections in short extended over a line of 
nearly two thousand miles in length, and a country that when 
faced as a wilderness by solitary groups of men as voyageurs, 
or traders sheltered in rude forts, abounded in forbidding 
elements, and suggests the limit of commercial hardihood 
and daring. That a second company broke away early from 
the first is hardly worth recording, as in a few years' time 
the two were again united to be stronger than ever. Liquor 
was of course a leading, if deplorable, collateral of the fur 
trade. It was a day of deep potations the world over at 
this close of the eighteenth century, and the Americans of 
all kinds were no more addicted to temperance than their 
relatives in Europe, more particularly perhaps the common 
sort, who drowned their cares in West Indian rum, or some- 
times brandy either French or locally distilled from peaches 
and apples. Even Wolfe complains of the addiction to 
rum of his New England troops at Louisbourg, pious and 
respectable farmers' sons as they were. If Fox and Pitt 
went unsteadily to bed every night, it is only natural that 
the true backwoodsman of that day should have drunk his 
fill and only maintained his useful purpose in life by the 
intermittent nature of his opportunities and his strenuous 
habits. The great wilderness entrepot of the Canadian fur 
trade of that period and for long afterwards, as I have said, 
was Fort William. Even to-day the stir and bustle of 
elevators, steamships, and locomotives, and the habitations 
of many thousand souls, only emphasises the shaggy and 
sterile and indeed awesome solitudes through which it is 
approached by land or water from every side. Here a 
century ago, divided by many weeks of laborious travelling 



222 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

on foot or by canoe from the nearest civilisation, stood the 
receiving storehouses of the Canadian merchants with the 
great hall in the centre, round the walls of which were hung 
as time went on the portraits of the nabobs of the Canadian 
fur trade — an oasis whose picturesque blend of savagery 
both human and physical with civilisation, seems to have a 
place of its own in the romance of commerce. Here on the 
grim shores of Thunder Bay, where the rapid amber streams 
of the Kaministiquia subside with deeper current into 
the waters of the mighty lake, were wont to gather at the 
appointed season the motley battalions of the Northern fur 
trade; but little dissimilar from those which a century 
earlier had gathered outside the stockades of Montreal, 
neither advanced in the amenities of life nor altered aught 
in their fantastic mien and wild appearance. Indians were 
here by hundreds, French and British and half-breeds 
by the score, all off long journeys, most of them handling 
money or its equivalent, and bent to a man on celebrating 
their bargains in one tremendous orgie. Here too at these 
original gatherings were various partners of the company, 
members sometimes of the Governor's Council at Quebec, 
kirk elders, magistrates, militia colonels, and men of light 
and leading. Strange but characteristic pictures of these 
functions have been preserved for us by the chroniclers of 
the fur trade. New Year's Day, if not the earlier Christian 
festival, had always and has even yet an exhilarating 
effect on the Scotsman. We are given some racy pictures 
of these dignitaries at play on such occasions, far from the 
censorious eye of governors, councillors, ministers and 
wives and deferential citizens as, seated in a row one 
behind the other on the floor of the great hall, they paddle 
imaginary canoes with poker, tongs or shovel in the small 
hours of the morning, and shout the boat-songs of the 
voyageurs. 

The buffalo robe of the prairies, that invaluable accessory 
to the civilised winter life of North America now extinct, 
had already been added to the spoil of beaver, mink, fox 



DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 223 

and other small fur-bearing animals that had formed the 
peltry supply of the wooded country from the Gulf of St. 
Lawrence to the Red River of the north. No picture of 
Canada at this time would be anything but inadequate 
without some mention of the fur trade, not merely for its 
commercial importance, but for the political and social 
power it came to be. While the U.E. loyalists of 
condition were struggling towards their supremacy in 
Upper Canada on small Government salaries, lawyers' fees, 
and well-advised speculation in land, and laying the founda- 
tions of the Family Compact, the wealthier fur traders of 
Montreal were steadily ripening for power, and forming 
another oligarchy for the virtual control of the Lower 
Province, which in after years, like the other, contributed so 
materially to the Mackenzie and Papineau rebellion of 1837-8. 
Dorchester's long term of service was now drawing to a 
close. Full of years, and wearied with the suspense and 
anxieties that the later, like the earlier ones in Canada, had 
brought him, he was beginning to look forward to the 
arrival of the successor whom the Government had promised 
him to appoint now that the critical period seemed over. 
But Adet, the French minister to the United States, still 
continued to disturb Canada with his emissaries, and is said 
to have actually written many of the inflammatory addresses 
that were circulated there with his own hand. Canards were 
started from the same source. Crushing British defeats by 
sea and land, the approach of French armadas in the 
St. Lawrence, and all manner of similar fables, were sent 
flying about the country. There is no evidence that the 
upper classes of French Canadians had the slightest desire 
to renew their connection with a France so utterly changed 
from the country of their origin and their old affections. 
Moreover, they admired and respected Dorchester,for though 
somewhat cold in demeanour, he was just and he was 
straight. Furthermore he liked them, and they knew it. 
Every appointment was open to them, and so far, according 
to the standard of that day, they had as yet nothing to 



224 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

complain of. Dorchester had given up all his fees, even 
those usual ones pertaining to Crown grants of land, a 
process which had been going forward busily since the 
immigration into the Lower Province began. He had also 
insisted on the higher servants of the Crown accepting their 
offices on the salaries alone, and dispensing with all 
extraneous exactions as lowering their dignity and offering 
improper temptations. He fought vigorously to the last 
against saddling the colony with mere placemen from Eng- 
land. His plain language to ministers is refreshing. He 
entered strong and constant protests against rewarding the 
petty political services of hangers-on in England by en- 
trusting the difficult services of a rising colony to their 
tender mercies. He deplored to their faces the short tenure 
of colonial ministers, telling them point-blank that it was 
impossible under such conditions that they could get a 
grasp of their duties. The corrupt practices of many of 
the agents concerned with land allotments had worried him 
not a little. He had kept in touch too with the Maritime 
Provinces that were under his suzerainty, but the strength 
of the U.E. loyalists there and their isolated situa- 
tion saved them from the troubles and anxieties that 
had been chronic in the Canadas. Naval attacks from 
France were practically their only danger, and that was 
chiefly the concern of the Imperial navy. What had really 
somewhat embittered Dorchester's last years was the 
friction between himself and Simcoe already alluded to. 
As the latter pathetically put it in a letter to the Home 
Government, he and his chief agreed in nothing either civil 
or military. Some of their differences have already been 
alluded to. But Simcoe, who in some ways was as fine a 
character as Dorchester, had none of the latter' s equability 
and restraint. He was much his junior, and was inclined to 
petulance and a too free insistence on his own theories. 
He had, moreover, gone to Niagara with the notion that he 
was in a manner absolute, a conviction that was not likely 
to grow less in the heart of those wild woods. 



DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 225 

Dorchester too was perhaps a little touchy on the matter 
of his supreme authority. In short they did not like each 
other, a misfortune, however, of very little consequence, 
since geographically there was such ample room in which to 
differ. The sharpest brush between them was when after 
Jay's treaty, Upper Canada being no longer in danger and 
the Lower Provinces alone being exposed to French attacks, 
Dorchester, who never had more than 2500 regulars in the 
whole country, ordered down the greater part of Simcoe's 
garrison. The latter, however, who very wisely used his 
troops for roadmaking and developing purposes, raised 
objections, and though the troops were ultimately sent the 
Lieutenant-Governor replied to the instructions in such 
a way that Dorchester wrote sarcastically to Portland, then 
in charge of the colonies, that the enclosures (from Simcoe) 
turned on the question of whether he was to receive orders 
from Simcoe or Simcoe from him. Dundas too had 
apparently and without premeditation humoured Simcoe's 
irregular method of direct correspondence with the Home 
Government. ' All command, civil and military, being dis- 
organised and without remedy, your Grace will, I hope, 
excuse an anxiety for the arrival of my successor who may 
have authority sufficient to restore order.' These final shots 
of the veteran pro-consul couched in ironical and some- 
what hyperbolic strain almost suggest the manner which, as 
Sir Guy Carleton in years gone by, he had rated Germain 
with yet more reason. But Dorchester was a privileged 
person, and deserved to be. This little ebullition, which is 
practically the end of our acquaintance here with a great 
Englishman, and one held by Canadians of to-day, and 
justly so, as the greatest of their Viceroys, must not leave 
the impression that he left the country under anything 
approaching a cloud. He was seventy-two and tired ; no 
wonder ! It was nearly forty years since he had made his 
first acquaintance with Quebec as Quartermaster-General in 
Wolfe's army and an active combatant in the siege. In 
every service he was engaged in for thirty years he had held 

p 



226 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

supreme command, and may be forgiven a little testiness 
at being, so he thought, dictated to by his subordinate as 
well as his junior in rank, years and experience. If he 
made mistakes they were fewer than most men's, and he 
had held the respect continuously of both friends and foes. 
The Chateau St. Louis, though not always his residence, 
was during both his long administrations the centre of a 
graceful and dignified hospitality. He was beloved by the 
French, for the political tergiversations of the habitants 
had nothing personal about them, and when a polished 
British society developed out of the unpromising material of 
earlier days he had as many staunch admirers among them 
as there were others who misliked his eagle eye for a job or 
his method of doing what he considered right regardless of 
what men might say of him. Though distinctly a Grand 
Seigneur, his kindness of heart was a byword. No case of 
undeserved hardship or neglected merit seems to have been 
too obscure for his attention, and when he thought rebuke 
was required he cared little for the rank of the offender. 
1 Come, my boys,' he had said to a batch of prisoners 
brought in to him after the flight of the American army from 
before Quebec, ' what do you come bothering me here 
for ? I have never done anything to annoy you ! Why do 
you come interfering with us in Canada? Well, go and get 
your dinner, and some provisions. Be off with you to your 
homes, and stay there.' The amour propre of the altruistic 
patriot may have been a little upset by this fatherly speech, 
but the practical benefits conveyed in it no doubt were 
ample compensation. For the whole of his career in 
Canada, Dorchester had to govern a community whose in- 
harmonious elements would have made the task no easy 
one in an island in mid-ocean. But his labours were nearly 
always carried on under the actual guns or under the war- 
like threats of a powerful neighbour across an unprotected 
frontier of virtually indefinite length, while, almost worse 
than war, he had to encounter intrigues that were scarcely 
ever for a moment at rest. 



DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 227 

Addresses of affection, respect and regret were showered 
upon the departing Governor by the French and British 
inhabitants both of Quebec and Montreal, coupled with the 
expression of devotion to the Crown and 'the happy 
government under which it is our glory to live, 5 while the 
high example set by the private lives of himself and his 
family were gracefully alluded to. The Governor and his 
lady, whose peculiar qualifications for her position at 
Quebec have already been alluded to, together with the 
younger members of their redundant family, left for Eng- 
land on July 9, 1796, Prescott, the Lieutenant-Governor, 
remaining as his representative till the following year, when 
he became himself Governor-in-Chief. The frigate Active, 
in which Dorchester sailed, was wrecked off the island of 
Anticosti, near the mouth of the St. Lawrence, but no lives 
were lost, and the party were conveyed by coasters to 
Halifax, where they reshipped for England. Dorchester 
died in 1808 at Stubbings near Maidenhead, one of the 
properties he had purchased. His wife, much his junior, 
lived nearly thirty years longer. Members of the family 
not long dead remembered her perfectly, and with some 
awe for the extraordinary ceremony she observed and 
exacted even in her own domestic circle, and though a small 
woman for the hauteur and dignity of her carriage to the 
last. Posterity, however, owes her a grudge, for she made a 
bonfire of all her husband's private papers on the lawn at 
Stubbings after his death. To say that we have nothing 
but his public correspondence, though true, does not seem a 
felicitous way of putting the case, seeing the immense 
amount of it which his long public service involved and 
is now preserved to us. It only remains to be told that 
six of Dorchester's sons died of wounds or disease on 
active service, and to plead in extenuation, if such plea be 
needed, of this somewhat protracted farewell we have here 
given him, the prominent part he played for so much of 
the half-century we have ventured to style the Making of 
Canada. 



228 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

Adet, who had so greatly troubled Dorchester, left North 
America soon after him, and we must leave Prescott to deal 
with some forty French Canadians and others who were at 
this time arrested as victims of his fictions, or of their 
own ambition or ignorance. A single one only, and he a 
Briton, a certain M'Lean of doubtful sanity, was made an 
example of by the hangman and quartered in the old style. 
The remainder were released or got light sentences. But 
we must go back to Simcoe and also a space in point of 
time, for the Governor of Upper Canada actually left for 
England, invalided, soon after Dorchester. Simcoe at 
Niagara had experienced even more troublous times than 
his chief. The Indian war raging on his frontiers was a 
constant menace, still further complicated by the strained 
situation towards the United States, which greatly agitated 
his own Indians on the Grand River, over whom he had no 
constituted authority. The man who had, Sir John Johnson, 
was constantly absent, and his lieutenants, the Butlers, 
Clauses and M'Kees, inured all their lives to such an 
atmosphere, pursued courses which, whether right or wrong, 
conflicted with the notions of this fastidious and in some 
ways rather prejudiced British officer. The great Mohawk 
chief Brant, whose influence with the militant tribes was 
great, though pledged himself to neutrality as a British 
subject and Canadian settler, was a chronic source of 
anxiety to Simcoe, who did not do him justice. Indeed, 
the Governor was somewhat inclined to hasty suspicions 
and to underrating men who stood in the path of his own 
enthusiasms or had been open enemies of his nation, for 
Simcoe's patriotism was of an ardent and burning kind. 

The desire of his life was to meet Washington again in the 
field, which was a not unworthy one, but his estimate of the 
sentiments of that great man and his good genius Hamilton 
are curious reading. In 1792, after St. Clair's defeat, and 
prior to Wayne's victorious campaign, three American com- 
missioners of distinction, Pickering, Lincoln and Beverly 
Randolph, had appointed Niagara as a place for a peace 



DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 229 

conference with the western tribes. They remained there 
some weeks awaiting the envoys and their negotiations 
with them, which we know ended in failure. The Indians 
would hear of no boundary but the Ohio. The Americans 
had already overleaped it and stood out as insistently for 
the more westerly Muskingum, that was ultimately adopted 
after Wayne's victory. Brant, who was present as ' Indians ' 
friend,' and was expected to have great weight, perceived 
the case to be hopeless, and the consequent lukewarmness 
of his speech lost him the confidence of both parties. But 
General Lincoln has at least left us some picture of Simcoe's 
little backwoods court, the hospitality of which he enjoyed 
for so long. He describes a levee on the King's birthday 
as attended by the members of the government, the legisla- 
ture, and the army, together with many strangers, while 
Simcoe's politeness and attention to every one present 
much gratified the American visitor. There was firing 
from the troops, the battery, and a ship in the harbour, and 
in the evening ' quite a splendid ball of twenty well-dressed 
handsome ladies and about sixty gentlemen, music, dancing 
and supper being all good and in excellent taste.' The 
Americans were greatly affected by the manners and ap- 
pearance of the half-breed Indian daughters of Sir William 
Johnson, who seemed the equals of the other ladies, and 
were accepted as such, though their mother, Brant's sister, 
kept the manners of her tribe. Altogether Lincoln was 
greatly struck by the hearty and sensible manner in which 
Simcoe had thrown himself into the work of an infant 
province of great potentialities. The Duke de la Rochefou- 
cault-Liancourt was also a visitor at Navy Hall, as Simcoe's 
homely residence was styled, a log-house built originally for 
the few naval officers on the lake, and now furbished up 
with additions to serve in makeshift fashion as the first 
Government House of Upper Canada. A refugee from the 
guillotine terror of the French Revolution and despoiled of 
his estates, the Duke travelled widely in America and left 
a record of his impressions. Of his host here he wrote, ' He 



230 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

is simple and plain though living in a noble and hospitable 
manner without pride, his mind enlightened, his character 
mild and obliging. Mrs. Simcoe is bashful and speaks 
little, but a woman of sense, handsome and amiable.' She 
acted as private secretary to her husband, helping him with 
the numerous maps and plans on which the practically- 
minded Governor was always busy. One of his younger 
officers and a companion in his backwoods travels was 
Lieutenant Talbot, who a few years later became so con- 
spicuous a promoter of Canadian settlement. Rochefou- 
cault, so long in Simcoe's company, tells us of his glad 
endeavours to deal discreetly with the stream of immi- 
grants that now came flocking in. Such colonists as cannot 
give a good account of themselves he sends to the back 
country, while he stations soldiers on the shores of the lakes 
in front of them. He would admit every superannuated 
soldier of the English army and all officers who are on half- 
pay to share in the distribution of such lands as the King 
had to dispose of. He would also like to dismiss every 
British soldier quartered in Canada as soon as he could find 
a young colonial to take his place, and give him a hundred 
acres of land, thereby making settlers out of European 
regiments and attaching young Americans to the British 
service before they settled on the land. As the Duke and 
Governor were riding along one of the new-made roads they 
met an American family from New York State with oxen, 
cows and sheep, who not knowing them said, ' We come to 
see if the Governor will give us land.' 'Ay, ay,' said the 
genial Simcoe, 'you are tired of the Federal government 
and of having so many kings ; you wish again for your old 
father King George, and you are quite right! Come along, 
we love such good loyalists as you are, we will give you 
land.' Simcoe's theories as to British regulars were hardly 
sound ; neither they nor their officers as a rule proved 
fixtures. But there was such a rush of more practical 
material, if not always of such assured monarchical prin- 
ciples, that this mattered little for the present. The Gover- 



DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 231 

nor was indefatigable. He hewed long roads through the 
forests, surveying lots upon either side ; one in particular 
from Niagara to his favourite embryo city of London on the 
Thames, that he had set his heart on for the capital, and 
that is still known in places with its metalled surface, cleav- 
ing an ornate country which would astonish the shade of 
Simcoe, as the ' Governor's Road.' Another was the notorious 
Yonge Street, which runs north forty miles from the heart 
of Toronto, keeping its name to this day for the entire 
distance. One of the most informing of the eighteenth- 
century travellers in North America, George Weld, was at 
Niagara, or Newark, in 1795 and counted seventy houses, 
and dilates on its rapid rise owing to the increase of the 
back-country trade and the wonderful immigration of people 
from the United States. Another spot which Simcoe in his 
letters is continually urging attention to is Long Point on 
Lake Erie, mainly famous for duck shooting, but his friend 
Captain Ryerse settled the county of Norfolk and the Port 
of Simcoe not far short of it, which became a notable county 
and a prosperous town. It is said that twenty thousand 
settlers came in during Simcoe's four years of administra- 
tion. The ten thousand or so U.E. loyalists, who had an 
average of about ten years' start of these others, regarded 
this wholesale influx with mixed feelings. Even the increase 
of prosperity it brought them they thought might be too 
dearly paid for if they were to be swamped by hordes 
of people from whose obnoxious views and distasteful 
society they had escaped. They had not encountered the 
hardships of Canadian pioneering to be again surrounded 
by the very people who had hounded them from their 
homes and robbed them of their property. It might be 
conceded that the newcomers were the least militant part of 
that accursed brood. Most of them probably were harm- 
less people who had ' sat upon the fence ' through the war. 
Many were inoffensive Quakers from Pennsylvania, or 
Germans from New York in whom there was at least no 
guile, but several thousand at any rate were suspects in the 



232 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

eyes of the faithful, and a good many in those of Simcoe. 
All, however, had taken the oath, but to probe the secret 
of their hearts or reckon on their line of action at a crisis 
would have been beyond the power of mortal man. Perhaps 
in most cases there was not much to probe and there was 
no guile at all. Simcoe and his U.E. subjects in their 
different ways were fired with altruistic principles of patriot- 
ism that took the first place in their lives. Such political 
feelings as these others had were in the main entirely sub- 
ordinate to their desire for good land and a quiet life. 
Simcoe, in spite of his friendly, genial ways with all sorts 
and conditions of men who would settle on his lots and 
open out his roads, had more than the common hatred of 
an English gentleman of that day for republicanism. He 
would have liked to found an hereditary aristocracy, not 
having the shrewd eye of Dorchester for its absurdity. He 
fought hard for an established Episcopal Church, and 
struggled against the licence for non- Anglican ministers, 
even those of the Scottish Establishment, to perform 
marriage rites. He was not in the least arrogant, but 
simple and honest in these convictions. He had something 
of the woodenness of a common type of Englishman. 
Practical in many ways and in spite of everything ex- 
tremely popular, he had never quite understood Americans 
of any kind, and never really absorbed the atmosphere as 
the cold and somewhat distant Dorchester had long ago 
succeeded in doing. 

The U.E. settlers shared his anti-republican prejudices, 
but as Americans looked on life from a somewhat different 
standpoint. For the moment they only felt that they alone 
had borne the burden and heat of the day. A good many 
land schemes and speculations that were beginning to 
interest many of them were disturbed by Simcoe's wholesale 
allotment of Crown lands. They had a natural feeling that 
they were a chosen people and a caste apart. Their names 
had been inscribed as it were upon a roll of honour, which 
the British Government had actually proposed to per- 



DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 233 

petuate by inheritance though the plan was not executed. 
Through the military nature of most of their settlements, 
they had a kind of corporate existence from the first and a 
feeling of brotherhood which made a serviceable base for 
the leaders among them to exact what they believed to 
be their deserts, an achievement which they contrived in 
course of time with notable success. In the Maritime 
Provinces power and rewards came to them naturally and 
without effort. They were so numerous as virtually to 
swamp the older population, and by their altogether 
superior quality to nearly all of the later waves of immigra- 
tion, chiefly from Great Britain, to keep their monopoly 
without any conscious effort. The full lists and personal 
details preserved for us of these people show that even 
of their greater abundance in the coast provinces the per- 
centage of men of standing was higher. Indeed, the U.E. 
element in these other colonies was almost too strong for 
the existence of a caste feeling. In Upper Canada it was 
different, and the smaller proportion of persons among the 
elect eligible in the eyes of an aristocratically-minded 
government for its loaves and fishes, made their oppor- 
tunities better, though they provoked a proportionately 
stronger feeling of jealousy among the large population of 
outsiders. Simcoe's county lieutenants, an office abolished 
later, were mainly chosen from this class, and so when 
possible were the sheriffs and magistrates, and very natur- 
ally so, as their loyalty was not merely assured, but was the 
argument for their existence in Canada. Many of them 
had pensions, some of them had now got their compensa- 
tion money from the Court of Claims. Having had the 
first selection of generous tracts of land, the very modest 
figure per acre which increasing settlement soon made it 
worth caused its sale in parcels to realise quite a handsome 
sum for a country of small things financially. They acquired 
valuable sites in the rising towns, built comfortable houses, 
turned their attention to politics and its incidental advan- 
tages and to the learned professions which had their 



234 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

plums. They began to combine too in the various specu- 
lations which a new country offers to those familiar with it 
in finance and wholesale trade. They became courtiers, if 
the term may be applied to the sunshine of a major-general's 
or a baronet's presence. To the latter the society of such 
people was naturally the most acceptable, and the social 
exactions of a more jealous and democratic age were not yet 
upon the Colonial Governor. And when your friends filled 
the legislative council and the bench and the Governor was 
also one — in short a happy family, together showing a united 
front to the common but somewhat impotent enemy, the 
popular Assembly, all the plums of office were then 
gathered as of right by the charmed circle and their 
nominees, while opportunities for even legitimate financial 
enterprise came much more easily to a group in touch with 
headquarters and one another and with their officials 
throughout the province. There had been practically little 
of this as yet in the Canadas, as any one who has followed 
my story so far might guess. They had been ruled by 
strong governors, not cliques. The provinces had been 
neither ripe enough nor rich enough for such conditions, 
nor had other circumstances favoured them. But the little 
U.E. oligarchy was germinating in Upper Canada. The 
seeds of the Family Compact were beginning to sprout, and 
Simcoe with his strong aristocratic tendencies was inadver- 
tently watering them. But the season was not yet quite 
ripe ; the ground was still a little too rough, the atmo- 
sphere too harsh. For all its first sessions, indeed, Simcoe's 
little parliament was busy with practical non-contentious 
measures. There had been as yet scarcely any Church of 
England clergymen, who alone in those days could legally 
tie the nuptial knot. Hitherto in many districts the 
marriage rites had been of necessity performed by colonels, 
adjutants or magistrates. It became necessary now to pass 
a retrospective law confirming these respectable but techni- 
cally irregular alliances and legitimising the fruit of them, 
and also providing for their legality in future should an 



DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 235 

Anglican parson be inaccessible. Acts were passed too for 
the destruction of bears and wolves, and one in the teeth 
of considerable opposition against the introduction of negro 
slaves. Numbers of these had been brought up from the 
South and elsewhere, and in the scarcity of labour proved 
very valuable. They were still occasionally bought and sold 
even in Upper Canada, and it was proposed in the legisla- 
ture to allow two years in which to purchase more, but 
the measure was defeated. A militia Act was of course 
passed, which further empowered the Governor to make use 
of the men if necessary on the King's ships on the lake. 
The little navy on Lake Ontario was at present chiefly 
manned by French Canadians, uniformed in blue and white, 
with a beaver stamped on their gilt buttons. The militia 
muster roll of the province amounted to 4700 officers and 
men, and I daresay a more efficient and ardent militia 
would seldom have appeared in the field had they been 
called to it as they constantly expected to be. The French 
emigre Duke already mentioned gives a humorous account 
of the fourth session of 1795, which Simcoe had deferred 
till August for otherwise good reasons, but it clashed with 
the harvest, and only two members of the Council and five 
of the Assembly put in an appearance. The Governor, 
however, entered the hall with the ceremony and decorum 
which his soul loved, dressed in silk with his hat upon his 
head and attended by his adjutant and two secretaries, 
while guard was mounted by fifty soldiers. The two 
members of the Council gave by their speaker notice of 
it to the Assembly, whose five members then appeared at 
the bar when Simcoe read the King's speech announcing 
Jay's treaty. The five members by proroguing the House 
from day to day kept the session going till the bulk of the 
country's legislators had housed their wheat and put in 
their appearance. The rest of the business transacted 
during Simcoe's time is not vital to this narrative and 
would most assuredly be of small interest to the general 
reader. 



236 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

The capitol in the meantime had been moved to Toronto 
in the year 1794-5, and its euphonious name with character- 
istic conventionality changed to York, ' in memory of the 
Duke of York's victories in Flanders.' It fortunately 
recovered in no long time its ancient and more harmonious 
designation, and during its intervening and unkempt period 
is chiefly recalled in Canadian annals with half-affectionate 
contempt as 'muddy little York.' The Legislature con- 
tinued for a time to meet at Niagara, but Simcoe, who was 
the possessor of a remarkable house of canvas stretched 
on movable frames which he had purchased from the 
celebrated Captain Cook, pitched it amid the stumps and 
woods that then covered the site of the future capitol. Here 
with his Queen's Rangers he busied himself in the congenial 
task of opening land to the sun and tracing out future streets 
and roads. Sawmills were erected, and a few houses built, 
though the transport of tools and machinery from the east 
to the embryo Toronto was a slow business in these days, 
while the goods were often of an inferior kind when they 
arrived. Through the summer, autumn and winter, travel- 
ling himself great distances on foot and by canoe up Yonge 
Street to Lake Simcoe and thence across to survey potential 
harbours on the Georgian Bay, the Governor rested little. 
Neither mosquitoes nor black flies, neither snow nor hail, 
rain nor mud, tedious portages nor laborious cruises with 
oars or paddle on windy lakes, seemed to have mattered 
much to this energetic soul. He could not have worked 
harder had he been developing some huge estate in which 
his present and future fortunes were wholly engaged, where- 
as his motives here were purely platonic. He doubtless 
owned his military grant of wild land, but we hear nothing 
of it. He was neither a needy man nor an intending settler ; 
such an asset would have been a trifle compared to his 
comfortable property in Devonshire which was waiting for 
him when he should choose to return to it. His constitution 
too was suffering from his exertions. Indeed, they shortened 
his life. It is not surprising that the idea he had brought 



DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 237 

with him to Upper Canada of being its independent 
administrator strengthened, and that he chafed under 
Dorchester's orders to make his towns here or his harbours 
there, and worse than all to despatch those handy, red- 
coated labourers of his to do garrison work at Quebec and 
Montreal ; and the worst of it was that Dorchester was 
generally right. The apparent certainty of war with the 
United States, so far as the Upper Canadians could judge, 
and the preparations to resist Wayne on the Maumee, 
already treated of, interrupted the industrial activities of 
the ever-busy Governor for a time in 1794. But Jay's 
treaty in the following year accelerated the rush into Upper 
Canada and the Eastern Townships from across the line and 
quickened the small stream that already trickled slowly in 
there from Great Britain. Having seen the infant endeavours 
of Toronto to struggle into a town well on their way, Simcoe 
spent some time at Kingston, and also in that eastern angle 
of the province formed by the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence. 
This is only worth mention for the sake of noting that 
population was here thickest and civilisation most advanced, 
that Kingston had now a hundred houses and considerable 
business, barracks which the Governor and his family and 
staff made their headquarters, and wharves for the war- 
sloops, gunboats, and merchant schooners. The religious 
difficulty had already arisen in the province. Its settlers 
were of all creeds, Lutherans, Quakers, Menonites, Dunkers 
and Methodists, while among the British U.E.'s Anglicans 
and Presbyterians were in a preponderance. The notion 
of an established Anglican Church seems to have occurred 
quite naturally to the Government in creating the province, 
though without any intention of directly taxing non- 
conformists. This was a more natural corollary than 
such a measure would seem to our more tolerant minds. 
The extent of the Establishment, however, was the reserva- 
tion of every seventh block of Crown land for the support 
of the Church and the building of parsonage houses. Simcoe 
was an unyielding Churchman. The Presbyterian body, 



238 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

which the Anglican of those days in Ireland or the colonies 
never seemed to remember was the Established Church of 
Scotland, petitioned him to empower the ministers of other 
denominations to perform valid marriages. The Governor 
not merely refused it, but was honestly shocked at the 
suggestion, and speaks of it as a truly wicked one. The 
not very respectful language in which the petition was 
framed perhaps aggravated in Simcoe's eyes the iniquity 
of the proposal. Allowances were made in the estimates for 
a few Anglican ministers, and the ' clergy reserves ' remained 
for nearly half a century a burning question in Upper 
Canadian politics. Bishop Mountain, the first Anglican 
prelate of Quebec, made a tour through Simcoe's domains 
and was greatly concerned at the preponderance of non- 
conformists who had here and there erected their small 
log churches. He found also a few itinerant Methodist 
preachers, ' a set of ignorant enthusiasts whose preaching 
is calculated only to perplex the understanding, to corrupt 
the morals, to relax the nerves of industry, and dissolve the 
bands of society,' a trenchant and finely-rounded indictment 
on the part of his lordship which has hardly been justified. 
Indeed the Anglican Church has never really flourished in 
any rural community in North America, unless one may 
except the upper classes in the Southern States, who even 
before the Revolution could not keep the majority of their 
neighbours within their communion, and after it lapsed 
freely themselves into the other sects. The Anglican 
Church in Canada, as in the United States, has never 
sensibly spread beyond the wealthier and more exclusive 
classes ; strengthened by a certain proportion from all 
classes whose connection with England and its communion 
is more recent. Its hold upon the average Canadian 
farmer was in earlier days, as now, always of the slightest. 
The more democratic and homelier creeds whose cruder 
forms shocked Bishop Mountain, and whose existence in 
any shape spelled for Simcoe republicanism and disloyalty, 
have always been a kind of second nature to the working 



DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 239 

yeoman of the colonies. Its strength has lain almost 
entirely in the cities and towns, where in the earlier 
days it monopolised all the social prestige that in later 
years, as was natural in a country where so many of the 
wealthiest and most enlightened people were sprung from 
the Scottish middle class, it has shared about evenly with 
the Presbyterians. The British Government might map 
out vast thinly-settled tracts with ecclesiastical parishes, 
build rectories, grant glebes, and allot wild lands for their 
support. But they only by these means aroused the jealousy 
of the majority and made cause of trouble. Simcoe was 
burning to found grammar schools and even a University. 
As to the grammar school, Dundas's discouraging reply 
was qualified by his expression of belief that there was a 
very good school in Nova Scotia, which as an educational 
alternative for the youth of 1795 on the Bay of Quinte was 
worthy of the ancient traditions of the colonial office, and 
would have given Dorchester's caustic pen a good oppor- 
tunity in his next despatch. Indeed there was a grammar 
school at Halifax, and very much so, for its pupils were 
either so numerous or so loyal that at the opening of the 
Napoleonic struggle, when every British community was 
sending voluntary subscriptions to the war fund, they 
contributed twenty-three pounds in a single occasion out 
of their pocket-money. Simcoe had started a printing 
press and a newspaper with a King's printer at Niagara 
at the beginning of his administration, and instituted an 
annual agricultural show. Indeed his head was full of 
schemes for the" province, practical and otherwise, but he 
was also full of fever, the corollary of even a healthy virgin 
country while being cleared of its original forests. In short, 
he had worn himself out for the time and could not have 
encountered another season. He sailed for England in 
September 1796 on leave of absence, but as it so happened 
never to return. Almost at once upon his arrival, though 
quite unfit for it, he was appointed to Santo Domingo, 
where he had to quell an insurrection of the negroes. But 



240 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

his health, only half recovered, again gave way. After two 
years' rest at home in Devonshire, and two more in command 
at Plymouth, he was appointed in 1806 Commander-in- 
Chief in India. In the interval of waiting for Lake's 
return he was sent on a diplomatic mission to the Court 
of Portugal concerning the expected invasion of that 
country by Napoleon. On arriving at Lisbon he was 
seized with an illness which proved to be fatal, and he 
just reached Exeter in time to die there. Simcoe is not 
forgotten in Canada. His weaknesses were minor ones, 
his virtues conspicuous, his industry untiring, and his aims 
lofty. He found twelve thousand settlers in the province. 
He left it with nearly thrice that number after five years, 
and in the somewhat critical planting of all those new- 
comers he had taken a personal lead. He was popular 
with both white men and red, and in short was in Canada 
at the very time to suit his genius. For it is questionable 
if his pronounced convictions on matters of Church and 
State and his exacting definition of a loyal subject would 
have suited the country in a more advanced stage of 
development. There is always a recognised flavour of 
romance about Simcoe's rule in Upper Canada : the meet- 
ing of the first little parliament in the backwoods station 
of Niagara; the long uncertainty whether a couple of 
shanties on Toronto bay or some shaggy woods on the 
banks of the Thames were to become the capital of the 
country ; the hardy explorations of the Governor himself 
through wild woods now replaced with familiar domestic 
landscape, by stormy solitary bays now lined with wharves 
and houses and crowded with shipping. Scenes change 
rapidly, and history makes apace in a new country and 
provides abundant food for sentiment to the reflective 
mood and the retrospective temperament. It is not the 
single century that gives the old log blockhouse its pathos 
within sound of the electric car, but the prodigious change, 
the making of whole nations and the wiping out of others, 
that its rude timbers symbolise. But there is something 



DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 241 

about the old associations of Upper Canada or Ontario, as 
we now call it, with its flavour of eighteenth-century 
personal devotion to a Crown, and the struggles of its 
loyalist refugees with intolerable hardship, that assorts well 
with the name of Simcoe. His devotion to his mission, 
his single-mindedness, his honesty and militant unconquer- 
able Georgian prejudices will, at any rate, always stand as 
an altogether felicitous figurehead to this earliest chapter of 
Anglo-Canadian history, the pathos and enduring heroism 
of which is a memory that, let us hope, will always be duly 
treasured by the descendants of the men — and the women — 
who made it. 



242 THE MAKING OF CANADA 



CHAPTER X 

IMMIGRATION — SETTLEMENT AND PROGRESS 

With the almost simultaneous retirement of Dorchester 
and Simcoe the two Canadas entered on that period of 
sixteen years preceding the war of 1812, during which they 
both rolled up population a little too fast for the somewhat 
halting machinery of their respective Governments and a 
succession of not particularly strong Governors. General 
Prescott was now in charge at Quebec, and early in 1797 
became Governor-General. The trials of the political 
prisoners referred to in the last chapter came up at this 
time, M'Lean alone, as before mentioned, suffering the 
extreme penalty and his body being afterwards quartered, 
the last instance in Canada of that time-honoured treatment 
of traitors. This last movement in Lower Canada must 
be disassociated from American influence or desires with 
the exception of Vermont. Such plot as there was, poorly 
and ignorantly conceived, and such sedition as had un- 
doubtedly been fostered, was in the cause of French 
Republicanism. Adet was at the root of it all, being con- 
sumed with a desire for reannexing Canada to the utterly 
changed France from which she had been parted. It was 
futile enough, as the American Government were hardly 
less hostile to such a scheme than the British themselves. 
But Republican France understood the American genius as 
little as the American anti-Federals had understood Re- 
publican France and for some time treated the United 
States with little less than contempt. But Adet was 



IMMIGRATION 243 

singularly active and persistent. He had told the Canadians 
that France having already conquered Austria, Italy and 
Spain, was now turning her attention to the subjection of 
Great Britain. He represented himself as having secured 
enslaved Canada as the first object of French deliverance, 
and shortly, so he told the habitants and those of the 
middling townsfolk who listened to him, many of whom 
were attracted by the offer of French ' commissions,' only 
one cry would be heard from Canada to Paris, namely ' Vive 
la R6publique.' But Vermont, though enrolled as a State 
in 1791, was to be a factor in this precious scheme. These 
restless people as represented by their spokesman and 
Governor, Chittenden, cared nothing for cries, nationalities 
or theories, but simply for trade outlets. Their aspirations, 
ideals, and political ethics centred wholly on a canal to 
the St. Lawrence. Whoever would secure to them this 
good thing, that flag would they fly. The shipload of arms 
already mentioned as captured in the English Channel 
with Ira Allen, proved how deeply the canal policy had in- 
fluenced their minds. The British attitude almost through- 
out, whether of Haldimand, Dorchester or Simcoe, had 
been mistrustful. It was conducted as a disagreeable duty 
that on behalf of Great Britain they were not justified in 
rejecting, but one obviously distasteful to men of fastidious 
honour. It would be absurd, however, in view of the 
uncemented political condition of that day, to judge these 
Vermonters by a high moral standard of patriotism. With 
a changed situation Vermont forgot its errant schemes and 
became a staunch pillar of New England and the United 
States. Ethan Allen, if not Ira, on the strength of his 
opportune but bloodless seizure of the lake forts, remains a 
hero and nothing but a hero to the average American. 
This twenty years' flirtation with Canada is probably un- 
known to most Vermonters, and certainly to most Americans 
but historical students. A reprint of the voluminous and 
extremely frank correspondence of their forebears with 
British governors and ministers between 1779-1796 would 



244 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

not make good reading for a 4th of July celebration 
in the Green Mountains. But Adet, who like Genet and 
Fauchet had come as minister to embroil the United States 
with Great Britain and seduce Canada, only succeeded in 
further alienating the Northern States and helping to secure 
the narrow defeat of his patron Jefferson at the presidential 
election of 1796. After this he was recalled and the 
particular poison with which he had inoculated Canada 
gradually evaporated before troubles of other and kindred 
kinds. 

When Prescott came out some two thousand regular 
troops and a volunteer corps of Royal Canadians ready for 
service and mostly French, constituted the sole defence of 
Canada. In Upper Canada the Queen's Rangers, about 
six hundred strong, were the only regulars. There is a 
curious correspondence preserved between the Duke of 
Kent, the late Queen's father, commanding at Halifax, 
and Prescott, now Commander-in-Chief, respecting the 
'enormous price of living' and the pay of soldiers and 
officers. The latter, declares the Duke, ought to have a 
special allowance, for everything in Halifax is so dear 
that even a mechanic who has a better income than a 
subaltern cannot make both ends meet. The fleet too eat 
up all the butcher meat in the market. He pleads for 
more winter clothes for the men and more provisions, if 
only as a guarantee against insubordination, and in another 
letter urges the abolition of the pay deduction for rations, 
which it may be remembered cost a mutiny in Montreal 
thirty years before in the days of Murray. Prescott 
replies that the cheapness of fish in Halifax in a measure 
offsets the other disadvantages, and in his own experience, 
which is hardly to the point, not being in Nova Scotia, 
represents the drunkenness of the soldiers on being paid off 
as proving that they had money to spare. 

There is not much of salient interest to be said of 
Prescott's three years of government. There was some 
lull in alarm and sedition. The Federal government of the 



IMMIGRATION 245 

United States was for peace, and reports of French fleets 
sailing up the St. Lawrence and French armies landing in 
England ceased to be circulated or at least to be believed 
even by the most credulous. The House of Assembly was 
still in its first youth and not yet conscious of its relative 
impotence. Prescott provides a variety in the chronicle 
of Canadian administration by falling out with his council, 
though outside it he was obviously popular. He was an 
honourable, and as his despatches would suggest, an able 
man. The great question of his day, always excepting 
the alien danger of the French war, was land settlement. 
The evil he fought, or thought he fought, was land- 
grabbing in high places. Though Upper Canada was the 
chief Mecca of the immigrant, the Lower Province was 
absorbing its thousands, not only in the Eastern Townships 
but in other districts outside the seigniories, which have 
now lost most of their British flavour. Elaborate details 
of Prescott's quarrel would be resented by the reader. But 
speaking broadly, the enormous number of applicants for 
land, mainly from the United States, had overtaken the 
activity or the supply of the Crown surveyors. The in- 
dividual grants which strike one nowadays as extra- 
ordinarily liberal, were twelve hundred acres, and the condi- 
tions, two acres to be cleared in the first five years and five 
more in the next. Many grantees were in the nature of 
undertakers, to use an old Ulster phrase; but that is a detail. 
All of them had to wait so long for the surveyors and the 
consequent title that many either went home again dis- 
gusted, or having ' burned their boats ' had no option but 
to squat without legal rights. Others again in choice 
localities had sold their grants or part of them previous 
to obtaining a legal title, but on the faith of it. The 
confusion therefore may be imagined, and that some 
definite settlement of it was imperative is obvious. On 
the top of all this came the oath of fealty, which had rightly 
been decreed as obligatory on every settler, but which 
from pressure of numbers and inadequacy of machinery had 



246 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

been in innumerable cases overlooked. Speaking broadly, 
again, Prescott took the view favourable to the 'man on 
the spot ' — to vested interests, that is to say, hewed out, if 
informally, by the axe and earned by the plough. He 
maintains in his letters to the Duke of Portland, still in 
charge of the colonies, that these men were mainly sub- 
stantial and industrious people and politically well disposed 
to Government. Numbers of them too, he urges, had gone 
home disgusted at the belated action of the surveyors and 
been lost to Canada. His executive council took the other 
view, and held that the rights of all such squatters should 
be disregarded, or at least subject to a strict inquiry into 
their sentiments and antecedents — a line which Prescott 
thought impossible, injurious to the country, and unfair. 
But the root of the matter lay in his deep suspicion of his 
advisers. Large tracts of land had been patented in the 
names of Quebec and Montreal clerks, and persons without 
money to pay the fees themselves, or the least likelihood of 
any desire to hew out homesteads. History thus repeats 
itself in curious fashion. At the close of the eighteenth 
century we find the virgin lands of Canada being advertised 
and sought after in the older regions of the contiguous 
States, even then, we may remind ourselves, approaching 
the bi-centenary of their corporate history. To-day and 
ever since the close of the nineteenth century, after the 
lapse of a hundred years, during most of which the move- 
ment was overwhelmingly the other way, there is once 
again the same activity of land jobbers, the same emigra- 
tion across the line from the south into Canada, and if 
the latter-day movement is infinitely larger, it is not much 
more so perhaps than is represented by the difference be- 
tween the surplus of eighty millions and the surplus of 
eight. The round figures of a century afford an always 
legitimate excuse for comparisons and reflections of a 
retrospective nature, and in this case they are of peculiar 
interest. Nowadays the two countries are in such peace- 
ful mood that the idea of war between them is commonly 



IMMIGRATION 247 

spoken of as ' unthinkable.' In those days they stood 
always upon the brink of it, and were in fact drawing 
near to its stern realities. Nowadays too the Americans 
seek Canada because they have no longer any virgin soil 
to speak of, and none at all approaching the other in 
fertility. But why, it may be asked at a time when the 
two countries were hurling opprobrious epithets at one 
another collectively and individually, and were always 
ready to do worse, did the surplus farmers and others of 
New York, New England and Pennsylvania — for only 
U.E. loyalists had come from the Slave States, — why 
did such thousands of these people prefer the yoke of 
a tyrannical king from whom they had just delivered 
themselves, to their own virgin west, then represented by 
the country south of Lakes Ontario and Erie, and the 
Ohio and Kentucky regions, which were equally fertile and 
of a milder climate? The reminder perhaps is hardly 
needed that the monarchical tyranny was a principle or a 
theory which the farmer in the colonial days had never 
practically felt. He was promised in Canada constitutional 
government, and against several hundred acres of good 
land, practically gratis, the Connecticut yeoman with a 
worn-out farm or his younger son may have been ready 
to risk King George, even though he might have learned 
at school to declaim Patrick Henry's famous 'chains and 
slavery ' oration. Furthermore, the American west had the 
Indian trouble still with it. Most of it was much further 
off than Canada. Taxes too were now heavy in the States 
whereas there were almost none in the colony. It may 
be even suspected that the village deacon was the chronic 
cause of a perceptible trickle of heady adventurers from 
the New England townships, just as the censorious eye 
of the Canadian priest in former days had driven hundreds 
of restless young habitants into the exciting paths and 
unbridled licence of the fur trade. Lastly, one may 
remember that the various States had not yet shaken off 
that ancient inter-colonial jealousy and dislike which had 



248 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

even interfered with the harmony, we are told, of the 
loyalist refugees when they gathered to drink confusion to 
George Washington in London taverns. It caused some 
friction in the early U.E. settlements of Nova Scotia 
and elsewhere, and would no doubt have caused more if 
the hardships of the situation had allowed time for such 
indulgences. There is ample evidence that the New York 
frontier was open to objection on the part of some New 
Englanders from the very fact that it was within the State 
government of New York. They would prefer their old 
enemy the King to that, and illustrated their preference 
by swearing allegiance to him. The many thousands of 
their successors who are annually doing the same to his 
Majesty's successor a thousand or two miles to the west- 
ward, have no such inter-state prejudices to help influence 
their steps. But in those days, with the memory of the 
ancient colony life and its old jealousies, it was perfectly 
natural. The immigrant of 1800, however, made actually 
a greater change in his political atmosphere, though he 
might not feel it more than his prototype of 1900 who 
makes practically none in Western Canada. For in the 
earlier period there were governors who counted for much, 
legislative councils who counted for more, and something 
approaching a privileged bureaucracy. Another thing too 
must be remembered, namely, that the greater part of the 
insensate rage which continued against Great Britain and 
threatened constant trouble came from the South. The 
border States, though by no means devoid of a hostile 
element, were businesslike and busy people and quite 
inclined to be friends. The Jeffersonian element, on the 
other hand, whose lands had been steadily running down 
under slave cultivation and were to run down still more, 
had ample time for conversation and social intercourse 
which helped no doubt to keep the anti-British feeling 
seething even to remote plantations. Still this earlier 
immigration was all, so to speak, suspect and had to 
be scrutinised, though it is obvious that in Prescott's 



IMMIGRATION 249 

time in Lower Canada it had in this respect got out of 
hand. 

Prescott, owing to his strained relations with a majority 
of his council, was recalled in 1799, nominally to explain 
matters, but actually never to return. He remained titular 
Governor-General, however, with a retiring salary attached, 
after the curious custom of those days, for eight years. 
That he was generally popular in the province is beyond 
question. Christie, the historian of Lower Canada, who 
could himself remember these events, says that he was 
' universally deemed an upright and honourable man, much 
respected by all classes and popular as a Governor.' He 
secured an Imperial grant for the construction of court- 
houses in Quebec and Montreal, for hitherto the law 
officers of Canada had been housed in a fashion hardly 
worthy of jurists of the class of Maseres and Hey, Osgoode 
and Monk. In the meantime Robert Shore Milnes, who 
as an absentee had held the lieutenant-governorship of 
the province, arrived in that capacity to take up the higher 
office as deputy to Prescott, and in 1801 was created a 
baronet. It may interest some to know that his salary was 
£4000 a year. Dorchester drawing on his private means 
and at a cheaper period had spent over ^5000. The chief 
officers of the province at this time were the Chief-Justice 
with a salary of £1200, and a Chief- Justice of Montreal 
with £900, and three Puisne Judges at ^500. There was 
also a judge at Three Rivers, and one at remote Gaspe, a 
fragment of the province at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, 
peopled by Canadian fishermen and a few U.E. settlers. 

There was a secretary and treasurer of the province, an 
Attorney and Solicitor-General, a Recorder-General, an 
Inspector-General and Surveyor-General, both of lands and 
works. All of these posts carried smaller salaries, but 
considerable fees. There was also an office known as 
Voyer- General, a sinecure of ^500 a year, now held by the 
prominent French seignior Charles de Lanaudiere, one 
of the old Carrignan Regiment noblesse. The Legislative 



250 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

Councillors had allowances of £100, and their clerk, at this 
time Herman Ryland, who was also secretary to the 
Governor, demands a word, as he played a considerable 
part in the history and correspondence of Canada. A 
Northamptonshire man, he had gone young to America in 
the pay department of the army with Cornwallis, but was 
taken up later by Dorchester when in command at New 
York, and became his private secretary afterwards in 
Canada and also Clerk to the Council. He threw up both 
situations owing to a disagreement with Prescott and went 
to England as informal envoy of the dissatisfied councillors. 
He returned, however, with Milnes and occupied his old 
posts, exercising a great deal of influence on the Canadian 
Governor, and no little from time to time on the Colonial 
Office through several administrations, dying at his house at 
Beauport in 1838. An able man was this, who in spite of 
the most robust Anglicising theories succeeded in retaining 
the private liking and respect of his French as well as his 
British neighbours; and we shall meet him again. Sub- 
scription lists are not stimulating items in history, but there 
is one preserved under date of May 1799 which speaks for 
itself with more significance than a page or two of descrip- 
tion. The contributions sent from all parts of the British 
Empire towards the French war have already been alluded 
to. In 1798 it was suggested by some that a vote of the 
House should be taken for a grant of £20,000 for this 
object. It strikes one now as a daring project in an 
Assembly overwhelmingly French, but there seems to have 
been no anticipation of its actual defeat, but only of some 
individual protests, on which account Prescott opposed it. 
A private subscription list was therefore opened, which is 
significant of the patriotism of the British and the un- 
mistakable sympathies of a considerable number of leading 
Frenchmen, having in view their lack of wealth. Among 
the former Bishop Mountain is down for £300 ; so are 
Osgoode and Caldwell. The House of Frobisher for £1 100. 
But much more interesting is the £500 given by the 



IMMIGRATION 251 

Catholic Seminary of Montreal, in addition to ^300 a year 
during- the war. The coadjutor Catholic Bishop de Plessis 
and numbers of cur£s figure for proportionately liberal 
sums. Among the French laity are such names as Tasche- 
reau, Duchesney, Panet, De Boucherville, St. Ours, De 
Lotbiniere, and others famous in the older annals of Canada 
and some still conspicuous in its bench and bar, and all 
down for substantial contributions. The most significant 
of all, perhaps, is a modest £10 contributed by a son of the 
gallant De Beaujeu who had flourished his hat as a signal 
for the daring and only too successful attack on Braddock 
forty odd years before and fallen dead at the first answering 
volley. The cards had indeed been shuffled since 1755 ! 
When the news of Nelson's victory of the Nile was received, 
a solemn mass was performed and a Te Deum chanted in 
all the parish churches, though it does not follow that the 
habitant was necessarily an enthusiastic participator. 

It was just now too that the last Jesuit died, and the old 
thorny question of their estates became ripe for settlement. 
Portland sent the necessary deeds for conferring them upon 
Lord Amherst, subject to their being passed by the Quebec 
parliament, apparently leaving to Milnes some latitude in 
the matter. Both races were anxious that the funds should 
be applied to education. Bishop Mountain complained of 
the lack of facilities for the higher education of the British, 
and with many others was anxious to spread the English 
language among the French by official instructors in every 
town and large village. The French leaders too were not 
backward in the cause of learning, but on condition that it 
was altogether in the hands of their Church. So matters 
languished. Sewell and Fouchet, Attorney and Solicitor 
General respectively, reported flaws in the text of Amherst's 
grant, so the Jesuit estates, which now produced ^"1400 
a year, were put in commission and not made over to 
Amherst at any time, and only to education thirty years 
later. A bill for allotting Crown lands to education and 
establishing free schools for the teaching of English passed 



252 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

through both Houses in 1801, but was never carried out 
owing to the opposition of the Catholic clergy. There is 
an interesting letter from Milnes to the Duke of Portland 
on the state of the province as it appears to him. He 
expresses some anxiety as to the strength of the Executive 
to resist the pressure of a somewhat raw and aggressive 
popular Assembly. He deplores the decline of the noblesse 
to such an extent that only a few of them are now lifted 
above the habitants in substance or manner of life. And 
this he says is owing to the laws of inheritance in the 
seigniorial families by which the small rents and fees are 
subdivided among the owners' families. He shows himself 
as still obsessed by old-world reverence for land qua 
land, and thinks the habitants ought to have more re- 
spectful gratitude to the seigniorial class for having granted 
them their plots, forgetful of the fact that the censitaires 
had cleared the land of timber and had put every improve- 
ment upon it ; in short, that they had created their farms 
out of, let us say, a hundred acres of wild forest land worth 
possibly, as the seignior handed it them, about twenty 
pounds. They obviously appeared to Milnes in the same 
economic situation as his father's Yorkshire tenants ! He 
laments too this decay of the aristocracy, lauding the 
peasantry as industrious, peaceable and well disposed, but 
easily led by designing persons through their simplicity. 
In all the world he thinks there is nowhere such absolute 
equality of condition as exists here outside the cities of 
Quebec, Montreal and Three Rivers. By this time, how- 
ever, the reader will understand this almost as well as 
Milnes. While Milnes himself is trembling for the authority 
of the Executive and Legislative Council, the latter as a 
matter of fact, having neither a Dorchester nor even a 
Prescott to modify their oligarchical tendencies, were pro- 
gressing steadily in that direction. The Governor and 
others complain of the lack of desire to exercise influence 
and take part in public affairs among the still well-to-do 
seigniors. The sympathies of these were with the Govern- 



IMMIGRATION 253 

ment, and the latter would have welcomed a more active 
co-operation. The bourgeoisie was rapidly growing into a 
class whose attachment was much less certain. He reports 
an excess of £1 2,000 a year in expenditure over revenue 
with pleasure, and hopes it will continue, as this dependence 
on the Crown for making up the deficit is one of the 
guarantees that ' His Majesty's Government can be carried 
on with advantage,' and he looks to the Crown lands to 
be a constant source of comfort to the Executive. So did 
they, and moreover had no scruples about throwing out any 
bill they disapproved of, which in the somewhat callow 
state of the popular House was perhaps just as well. 
Milnes reports the population as 160,000, including 30,000 
British. He would attach the Catholic Church and priests 
to the government by salaries, and insist on a Government 
licence being a necessary preliminary to ordination. In 
all this Ryland's influence is manifest. The paper militia, 
comprising all males between the ages of sixteen and sixty, 
number 37,000, including 292 of those time-honoured parish 
notables known as ' captains,' at this time according to 
Milnes for the most part leading habitants ; the sixteen 
etat-majors only belonging to the aristocracy. He would 
like to give both of these ranks who do so much useful 
work a small salary or allowance. He looks forward to so 
large a sale of Crown lands that the proceeds invested in 
the British Funds will supply an income sufficient to make 
his Majesty's Government in Canada pecuniarily indepen- 
dent of an Assembly likely to be troublesome in the future, 
and one which perhaps most administrators at that time 
would have regarded with some anxiety. He is also 
gratified at the grant of Crown lands to education — which 
we have seen was not utilised — as the necessity for sending 
the youth of the better -class Anglo-Canadians to the 
United States for that purpose was clearly dangerous to 
their principles. He concludes : ' The respectable footing 
upon which the Protestant Church was about to be put 
in Quebec will likewise tend to that increase of con- 



254 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

sideration which ought to prevail for the Established 
Church.' 

Bishop Mountain soon afterwards addressed the Govern- 
ment on the advisability of establishing the English Church 
in the province. He thought it suffered in dignity by the 
measure of state recognition enjoyed by the higher Catholic 
functionaries. Since the re-establishment of the Catholic 
bishop and coadjutor bishop of Quebec, the former was 
technically nothing more than the ' Superintendent of the 
Romish Church,' but courtesy had conceded the full titles 
to both. When the excellent Bishop Denant died in 1806, 
and his able young coadjutor Plessis succeeded him, the 
feelings between the party whose aim was gradually to 
Anglicise Lower Canada and the others was brought to a 
head. The then acting Governor Dunn, however, decided 
that Monseigneur Plessis should take the oath of allegiance 
as Bishop of Quebec, which finally determined the ques- 
tion. The Anglicans too by that time had erected their 
cathedral in the upper city of Quebec, that modest and 
eminently Georgian building so suggestive of the atmo- 
sphere of its day, about which so many memories have 
gathered, and that no one but perhaps an unsympathetic 
ecclesiastical architect would wish to replace. Till the 
close of Milnes' administration in 1806 there seems to have 
been little of the acute racial feeling which may be said to 
have begun immediately after it with the founding of the 
first French Canadian paper Le Canadienne y a notable pub- 
lication that enjoyed a somewhat stormy career. In what 
proportions cause and effect were blended in the pages of 
this fiery journal we need not stop to consider here. Hither- 
to political cleavages had run mainly along natural lines, 
such as those between commerce and agriculture and the 
methods of taxation that each supported in its own behoof. 
For it will have been seen how large an English-speaking 
agricultural element had by now arisen even in the Lower 
Province ; if numerically but a sixth perhaps of the rural 
French, yet infinitely more active as agriculturists when 



IMMIGRATION 255 

the first laborious years of timber-felling, logging, fencing 
and house-building were over. It is a pity that such normal 
and healthy conditions, due in part to the primal necessities 
of a large but recently settled element, could not have con- 
tinued. He would have been, however, an ingenuous or 
optimistic soul who could have looked forward without 
anxiety to the juxtaposition and partnership of these two 
sturdy and obstinate nations representing so much that 
was opposite in faith, character and tradition. 

Upper Canada in the meantime, from the departure of 
Simcoe in 1796, had for the decade, lightly dealt with in the 
foregoing pages, pursued the path of early development 
with the dogged industry that is to this day its charac- 
teristic. There is not much in this that the reader would 
call history. The question of land and surveys, roads and 
mill sites, harbours and townships, submerges all else, and 
fills the atmosphere. Interminable lists of candidates for 
blocks and parcels of land fill pages of the archives. Yet 
as memory ranges over that now teeming country covered 
even more thickly with substantial homesteads than most 
parts of genuinely rural England, and thickly sprinkled 
with busy little manufacturing towns bearing names often 
familiar throughout the world for their commercial products, 
the long weary lists of these pioneers who went into the 
forest so long ago, English, Scottish, Irish, German, Dutch, 
page after page, seem to gather about them an almost 
romantic significance. For ten years after the departure of 
Simcoe Upper Canada was administered by deputies, of 
whom Peter Russell, President of Simcoe's Council, was the 
first. Like Ryland, while a junior in the British army 
during the American war, he had attracted the notice of a 
Commander-in-Chief and served as Sir Henry Clinton's 
secretary, gaining a varied experience, however, both in 
civil and military life. Energetic and industrious, he ad- 
ministered the province efficiently for three years, though 
his enemies declared that part of his industry was directed 
to ascertaining the best tracts of land and deeding them to 



256 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

himself. Every member of the Executive and Legislative 
Council was legally allotted 6000 acres, but having practi- 
cally the sole disposal of the Crown lands were confronted 
with immense temptations to take care of themselves and 
one another. All these blocks of land were merely specu- 
lations, and resold to actual settlers at leisure. Russell 
summoned the second parliament of Upper Canada to 
York, to the disgust of many of the legislators, lawyers and 
jurymen, who for lack of accommodation had to live in 
tents, or crowd together in huts — a situation perhaps unique 
in the story of British Parliaments. American garrisons 
had now taken possession of the treaty posts, of which 
Detroit and Niagara looked right over into Canada. Brant 
and his Indians too were causing a little anxiety. That 
astute chieftain, bitten with the land-dealing fever, wished 
to convert into cash some of the lands on the Grand River 
which Government had granted them. Russell did not 
think their title of occupancy admitted of this, and Brant 
wrote letters to Philadelphia and elsewhere accusing the 
deputy-governor of land-grabbing, but the matter was 
ultimately arranged. An unfortunate incident had some- 
what embittered the famous Mohawk chief, for in an 
unprovoked attempt on his life made by his own son he 
had accidentally killed the latter in self-defence. The 
American occupation of such neighbouring forts made a 
bad impression on the Indians, and rumours of a combined 
attack of French and Spaniards from the Lower Mississippi 
on Upper Canada had been bruited about, but nothing 
serious of a political nature actually occurred. The cor- 
respondence of the time other than such as was concerned 
with land chiefly illustrates the inconveniences of remote- 
ness as felt in a new country before those inventions of 
science with which our generation are familiar made 
pioneering a far briefer as well as a milder trial. There 
was not a single church as yet west of Kingston, and the 
Crown now contributed a few hundred pounds towards the 
building of one at York, Newark, and Sandwich respectively. 



IMMIGRATION 257 

The former place was still so much in the woods that during 
the session's parliament Elmslie, the Chief-Justice, complains 
that in this embryo Toronto the people compelled to resort 
there had not merely to live in the open, but were in 
danger of being starved. Among the applicants for land 
the traitor Arnold reads strangely, and the correspondence 
accompanying it stranger still. His claims were those of 
course of a U.E. loyalist, and Cornwallis supports them 
on the ground of his ' gallant and useful services in the 
island of Guadelope.' So does Simcoe, referring at the 
same time to any suggestion of his residence there as most 
obnoxious to the loyalists ; for Arnold, now a retired general 
in the British service, had intended to go and settle in 
Canada with the older members of his family. An excep- 
tion was made in his favour by Portland in consideration 
of his wounds, and he was given the large concession of 
14,000 acres with the option of non-residence. 

Among the numerous groups that were now pouring into 
Upper Canada the most picturesque in the retrospect and 
the most unsuccessful in performance was that of some 
noble French exiles from old France, expelled for their 
military activity against the Republic. The leader of this 
movement was Count Joseph de Puisaye, who had served 
with the British forces at Quiberon. His motives and 
schemes are fully set forth in letters from Portland and 
Windham, who knew him personally, to Russell. These, 
broadly speaking, were to plant a military colony of French 
Royalists in Upper Canada on grants of land, which was to 
constitute at the same time a regiment in the British service. 
The scheme, as embodied by De Puisaye at great length, 
and more briefly indicated by Windham to Russell, was 
characteristic of many such, before and afterwards, patheti- 
cally elaborated by men familiar only with the class 
distinctions and atmosphere of an old country and full of 
plans for their conduct in what may almost be called another 
planet. Locke, it may be remembered, had drafted a consti- 
tution for the first settlement of South Carolina, in which an 

R 



258 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

order of nobility designated Caciques were to be created on 
the spot and play the part of hereditary lords in the future 
colony ! The Count, says Windham, wishes to settle away 
from all other French-speaking people in Canada, consider- 
ing his party, who all know each other, as of a purer 
description than the mass of the latter ; nor do they wish 
to be mixed with those of whose principles they are not 
assured, and who might bring future reproach on the colony. 
Windham admits that he is attracted by the feudal flavour 
of the movement, and so evidently was Simcoe. The whole 
organisation of the regiment, commencing with 150 rank 
and file, is carefully detailed, which is reasonable ; and then 
comes the domestic and agricultural side of the question, 
the distribution of labour, the manner in which the land of 
the ' gentlemen ' shall be cultivated, and all sorts of beauti- 
ful schemes that by any one familiar with a wild country, 
above all one like Upper Canada, can, as I said before, be 
only described as pathetic in its innocence. However, the 
King approved of the rules, and the cabinet ministers made 
no adverse comments. Russell did not of course get the 
full draft of this little feudal Utopia, that lies before me now, 
but on receiving the general idea of the scheme and instruc- 
tions to allot lands, he proceeded to the latter business, and 
selected the townships of Pickering and Whitby to the 
north-east of Toronto, which may interest any of the 
present inhabitants of those populous districts of an anti- 
quarian turn of mind. One can detect a dry flavour in his 
reply to the Government, for Russell was a hardened expert 
in the science of settlement. The loyalist regiments had 
been of course by comparison ready-made pioneers, but he 
had watched the fortunes of more than one company of 
regulars thus planted, and though even these, as compared 
with French counts and marquises, were eligible settlers, 
had seen the considerable measure of failure which attended 
them. He nevertheless surveyed a tract of primaeval 
forest, though his Chief- Justice, Elmslie, like all his com- 
peers an imported English barrister, was ready with judicial 



IMMIGRATION 259 

objections, and doubtful if a proper title could be made out 
for aliens. They arrived in due course at Quebec, two 
counts, two marquises, a viscomte and a dozen gentil- 
hommes and a few ladies, with a rank and file amounting to 
forty in all, having shed some deserters at Plymouth by the 
way. Russell recommended them to winter at Kingston, 
as he doubted if York could accommodate persons of their 
condition in a suitable manner. He considered the locality 
allotted to them as excellent, seeing its remoteness from 
the French of Lower Canada on the one hand and those 
of Detroit on the other. Moreover, he continues with 
prophetic significance, its propinquity to the seat of govern- 
ment would enable him to relieve their difficulties in case 
of need. He was ready to enrol them as a militia regiment 
at once, and to put De Puisaye in the commission of the 
peace. General Hunter, who superseded Russell in 1799, 
takes up the correspondence with Portland. When the 
company actually arrived, Lieutenant-General Count de 
Puisaye preferred the comparative civilisation of Niagara, 
and bought a farm there. Twenty of the others, with 
the Viscomte de Chalus, settled on their grants, named 
after their best friend, Windham. The remainder, under 
the Marquis de Beaupoil, abandoned the enterprise on 
sight, in disgust apparently at its condition and prospects. 
' The Marquis de Beaupoil,' writes Hunter, c having had some 
misunderstanding with the Count de Puisaye, or not finding 
the enterprise suitable to his expectations, has determined 
to return to England.' How well one can see it all ! The 
faithful twenty, however, cleared a few acres with the help 
of some French Canadian woodsmen, but are reported as 
quite without means, and applying for seed and rations. 
De Puisaye himself ultimately died in poverty in England. 
His remaining settlers were soon scattered, and apparently 
Colonel Quetton de St. George alone remained to leave 
descendants to play a part in Canadian life. This to be 
sure is but a passing incident, a trifle more picturesque 
than common, but otherwise merely one of those innumer- 



26o THE MAKING OF CANADA 

able little enterprises of the optimistic, the well-bred and 
the unsuitable that so thickly sprinkle the three-century 
chronicle of British colonisation with the marks of their 
foredoomed failures. The beginning of the nineteenth 
century, however, throughout all British North America is 
thick with pioneering adventures, mostly under leaders like 
Selkirk in the North- West ; Talbot, the Irish officer and 
Simcoe's friend, along the shores of Lake Erie ; Bishop 
M'Donnell in the Glengarry country towards the angle of 
the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence ; Gait, the novelist, with 
his Canada company towards Lake Huron. Pennsylvania 
Germans too had occupied en bloc the present prosperous 
county of Waterloo, still peopled with their descendants, 
while alongside of them is an equally vigorous and pros- 
perous population, whose ancestors William Dickson of the 
Legislative Council brought from Annandale and his 
native county of Dumfries. There are others again whose 
names have long been merged and forgotten in those of 
flourishing towns or villages, covering the spot where they 
opened their first clearing, or erected their primitive land 
office. These, however, were not for the most part schemes 
for giving the soft-handed and the well-born a woodland 
Utopia, but for the relief of the British peasantry. They 
assumed for obvious reasons greater dimensions after the 
peace of 18 15, when the British Government moved actively 
in the matter. But already among the swarms of Ameri- 
cans who had followed the U.E. loyalists, batches of 
Scotch, Irish and English were to be found, though for 
the present the Maritime Provinces seemed their more 
natural goal, and became so. Another enthusiastic but far 
more practical and persevering nobleman, the young Lord 
Selkirk, bought 70,000 acres of land in the extreme west of 
Upper Canada on Lake St. Clair in the year 1803 ; and for 
those to whom the price of wild land in these old times 
may be of interest it seems generally in large blocks to 
have been worth about a dollar an acre. Of Selkirk's I 
shall speak presently. The clearances in the Highlands, 



IMMIGRATION 261 

which helped so much in the earlier building up of our 
greatest colony, may often have been effected ruthlessly ; 
but that is another matter. Yet is there any one living 
who has been privileged to see the effect of transfers like 
this to the comparative fatness of a new country, with the 
certain prospects it holds out, that could look on the agents 
of it as other than benefactors, or the objects as other than 
benefited ? What was the use of British colonies if poverty- 
stricken people, though from ignorance they may have 
tolerated their poverty and feared the unknown, could not 
be transplanted to those free and fertile spaces where the 
British flag flew and laws, of necessity even better for the 
poor man than British laws, obtained ? Thousands who at 
home were very far from the verge of want have gone there 
cheerfully, without thought of regarding themselves as 
objects of compassion, and thanked heaven for their own 
sakes and above all for their children's, that they have 
taken a hand in building up the British Empire. Why 
then should the removal of those whose lot must have been 
and must always be hard, even if they had their wretched 
lands free, be regarded, not by the politician, for he is 
concerned with votes not actualities, but by the honest and 
unreasonable sentimentalist as if it were some question of 
Siberian exile ? It is only possible to attribute this attitude 
to the limitation of the objector himself, his lack of oppor- 
tunity to contrast the two situations, his want of proportion 
in weighing the timorous ignorance and nostalgia of an 
elderly minority against the prodigious advantage of the 
younger majority and the immeasurable gain to their own 
and their children's children. No properly constituted 
Briton who loved his country, unless he were a hopeless 
materialist, would wish to banish the man of reasonable com- 
fort on the chance of his acquiring a greater measure of it, 
nor, however intimate he might be with colonial life, would 
he wish to dislodge the tenant sitting on an average fifty or 
hundred acre farm, whether in West Yorkshire, in Cardigan, 
or Kilkenny. Though he may only make both ends meet, 



262 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

he has the housing and requirements of a self-respecting 
man. He is farming land, that the Almighty meant to be 
farmed, though he is almost sure to be living on a less 
generous scale than his relative of equal diligence who took 
up land young in a colony. In a country like modern 
Britain, so much and so unfortunately given over to 
urban or suburban existence, with a corresponding loss to 
the rural perceptions, a wet moorland seems often to be 
credited with the potentialities in agricultural calculations 
of a Lothian farm or a Manitoba prairie. It is vainly and 
vaguely imagined by so many men of the pavement to be 
only a question of science and industry. An inclement 
climate and a poor soil with their unconquerable terrors in 
combination would seem to have scarcely any significance. 
Land is land, and that is enough ! There seem to be some 
who hold the incredible theory that even the unalterable 
verge of want on a native soil is better than comfort and 
prosperity on another, though that be a British colony! 
The amor patricz of the ignorant is not a matter to be 
spurned, but it is a question how much of mere superstitious 
terror of a change of scene is blended with it all. It is 
another whether these local attachments, whatever view an 
analyst may take of them, should not be sacrificed to the 
welfare of the young and those to come after them. 

In 1799 General Hunter arrived as Lieutenant-Governor 
of Upper Canada and commander of all the troops in both 
provinces. Nothing of moment occurred unless the fact of 
his Attorney-General, White, being killed in a duel by the 
Clerk of the Council may be accounted as such. It was 
extremely inconvenient, as his place had to be filled from 
England, a tedious process in those days. It provides an 
occasion too for remarking that duelling was tolerably 
frequent with these councillors, legislators and lawyers in 
their backwoods capital. So also was hard drinking, a 
custom in which they were not likely to be backward at a 
time when both Celt and Saxon at home were so convivial. 
There was not much wine probably at even York and 



IMMIGRATION 263 

Kingston dinner-tables ; the cost of carriage was prodigious. 
Whisky punch of home manufacture was more popular, 
for imported rum was not likely to hold its own against 
such a rival in the face of the large Scottish element. 

There seems to have been chronic anxiety in regard 
even to the Canadian Indians, whose nerves had been 
naturally upset by their uprooting on the Mohawk. They 
maintained a not wholly unsuspicious correspondence with 
the western tribes towards the Mississippi, from up whose 
waters and their base at New Orleans some fraction of the 
vast fighting machine of Napoleon was half looked for on the 
borders of Canada, and not altogether without reason. For 
Adet's emissaries had been as busy among the Indians as 
among the French Canadians, while the American borderers 
of Kentucky and the Ohio were always an uncertain 
quantity. They would, cceteris paribus, be Americans, but 
were in fact political egotists feverish with the lust of land, 
fascinated by the dawning possibilities of the New West, and 
not averse to making a bargain with almost any Power who 
would give them a free hand on the Mississippi and then 
leave them alone. But the Peace of Amiens in 1801 brought 
a short respite for a time to these alarms. Hunter ruled 
Upper Canada for six years without friction, and that is 
almost all that is known of this, the most shadowy figure 
on the whole record of Canadian Governors, though 
evidently not a shadow in fact, but rather an energetic 
military man who got himself obeyed and earned no bad 
name. There are plenty of his letters, but they tell nothing 
except that he was diligent, blunt and straightforward, and 
met little opposition. He describes Toronto in 1804 as 
being without a single public building. His council of nine 
and his legislature of sixteen met in two rooms erected 
by Simcoe as the nucleus of Government House. The 
Executive met in a room in the clerk's house, through the 
thin walls of which every word was audible. The Courts 
of Appeal and of the King's Bench, the district court and 
quarter sessions, all held their sittings in the same room. 



264 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

The Crown had erected suitable courts in Lower Canada, 
and they were now petitioned to do likewise for the Upper 
Province. Hunter was unmarried and in his sixtieth year 
when he died in Quebec during one of the frequent visits 
that, as Commander-in-Chief, he was compelled to make. 
He was buried in the new cathedral, where a tablet may 
be seen erected to his memory by his brother, a London 
physician. Russell was not re-nominated administrator 
on the death of Hunter, somewhat to his mortification. 
Alexander or Commodore Grant, so-called from the fact 
that he had commanded the fleet on the lakes, was voted 
to the office by the Council. As Hunter is said to have 
been son of an Ayrshire landowner, so with more certainty 
was his successor the son of an Inverness-shire laird, who 
moreover had been out in the Forty-five. In the following 
year, however, Mr. Francis Gore was nominated Lieutenant- 
Governor of the province, and, with the exception of the 
war period of 1 812-14, held that office till the year 1818. 
He was a weak man, and it may be said, speaking broadly, 
that his advent marked the period when Upper Canada 
began to fall into the hands of that oligarchy which 
developed later into the celebrated Family Compact, the 
leading note of Upper Canadian history. A little breeze of 
popular clamour had arisen even in Grant's tenure. The 
internal taxes of the province, with its eighth share in the 
customs revenue of Quebec, nothing like met the expenses 
of administration, for the considerable revenue from lands 
went to the Crown though expended by it upon the 
province. Hunter it appears had applied, and Grant had 
endorsed a trifling sum from the internal revenue to some 
public purpose without the consent of the legislature, who 
thereupon protested in language worthy of the most 
momentous occasion and the largest financial operations. 
It was of little material consequence, but was the first note 
of the long conflict which the popular House waged against 
what they regarded as usurped powers that on several 
occasions in after years set the Crown itself, or at least its 



IMMIGRATION 265 

nominees, at defiance. Dr. Bryce in his short history 
probably represents the average impression that has come 
down in Canada when he alludes to Gore even on his 
arrival as being ' surrounded by a combination of office- 
holders, land speculators, and so-called persons of good 
society in the capital of Little York. He became their 
bond slave. This knot of professional politicians and 
hereditary rulers, as they regarded themselves, looked with 
contempt on the inhabitants of the rural districts, especially 
on the later American emigrants.' This would be not 
unfair criticism for any one holding a brief for the Canadian 
public of those early days, but the U.E. loyalists, who 
were the chief offenders, would stoutly urge their claims to 
the first-fruits of the country. They had been the first 
settlers, and regarded the province in a sense as their 
inheritance. They could not prevent their former fellow- 
countrymen, against whom collectively they had naturally 
the bitterest feelings, pursuing them into their refuge, as 
that was the concern of the British Government. Moreover, 
they made money out of them by land sales, and in the 
various ways that early and well-established settlers always 
make money, and legitimately out of the needs of later 
immigrants ; a satisfactory and partial atonement for the 
confiscation and persecution they had themselves suffered. 
But they viewed with not unnatural suspicion every 
American who settled in the country attracted only by 
the fertility of the soil and with political principles either 
indifferent or republican. That they should have been 
willing to share place and power with these nondescript 
hordes of a now detested nation because they were ready 
to sell them land is a little too much to expect of human 
nature. They were still a chosen people ; they had been 
thus officially tabulated, and had very nearly become a 
legally perpetuated caste. Above all, as we know, they 
contained a percentage of men fitted by rank and educa- 
tion to lead, such as would scarcely exist in the ordinary 
agricultural element that had been flowing in from the 



266 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

States. It was of course the upper ranks of the U.E. 
loyalists, combining with the few imported English legal 
and other officials, who thus by degrees acquired supreme 
control. The rank and file stuck to their leaders for the 
most part, for esprit de corps was still strong within them, 
and they got some crumbs. But both they and the new 
comers were too busy in the woods, from which the gather- 
ing oligarchy had now mostly freed themselves, to make 
much protest. The latter had with some justice secured 
most of the offices and much of the trade, and lived con- 
genially in clusters at Kingston, Newark, and Little York, 
with here and there an exception, where on the shores of 
either lake some especially promising enterprise made 
isolation endurable. They had secured the Council, the 
Executive, and now, as we have seen, had a valuable recruit 
in the Governor. The Lower House mattered little at 
present, for it had small control over the finances and 
remained nearly impotent for two generations. Nor was 
this monopoly by any means the deplorable thing that some 
modern readers might imagine and some Canadian writers 
have been inclined to represent it. It is quite true that this 
perhaps somewhat arrogant clique used their opportunities 
for securing Crown lands very freely, and perpetrated a 
good deal of jobbery such as was then rife among those in 
power in every country — a fact that commends men like 
Dorchester, Haldimand, and Simcoe so strongly to one's 
admiration. It would be irrelevant to say that under the 
purely democratic regime of modern Canada similar things 
are not unknown. For in a democracy they are winked at 
as a kind of natural outcome of success by so large an 
element that the worthier one is powerless, while under 
mutual recriminations of party strife the sinner is practically 
safe, and is further aided by the modern worship of success 
even when it is sordid. The achievement of the aristocrat 
in undue aggrandisement at the popular expense seems to 
stir the wrath of many who will sit down quietly under the 
other. This is illogical. There is no excuse for either, but 



IMMIGRATION 267 

the aristocrat has at least that of tradition. The other is 
automatically a professor of political morality, the traditional 
opponent of a class for whose benefit, once upon a time, the 
people were really considered to exist. So when the latter 
plunders the class whose champion he has in a sense 
become, and after a decade or two in politics, without other 
occupation, emerges a millionaire, it is not merely that 
wealth does not become him so well, for that is purely an 
artistic standpoint, but he also wears the odious guise of 
an impostor. 

The old U.E. loyalists, however, were not half so bad as 
either. They probably felt that they had almost a right to 
substantial slices of the country. Few of them had been 
compensated to anything like their losses, and if they some- 
times helped themselves to Crown lands, objected to sharing 
office with freshly imported republicans, for all they knew, 
and generally regarded themselves as the salt of the 
country, it is not surprising. They were a robust people of 
strong convictions, and ready to fight for them. As a matter 
of fact, it was a good thing for Canada that such an oli- 
garchy was in power ; for the war of 181 2 was coming, and 
no community of British blood had ever been in a more 
perilous situation than were they. Only men of strong 
convictions and deep prejudices could have won through. 
The stump politician, the Quaker settler, the itinerant 
preacher, admirable work as he had done in the wild woods, 
or again the mere land-hunter, were not the men for the 
moment in Upper Canada. With all his arrogance, if one 
must have it so, the U.E. loyalist and the oligarchy he was 
setting up were just the local weapons which Great Britain 
needed to help her in the formidable task of defending 
a frontier over eight hundred miles in length against a 
numerous foe. The population was now about seventy 
thousand, and that in a country which, a little more than 
twenty years previously, had been a virgin wilderness — not 
a miraculous performance in these days of teeming popula- 
tions, easily and quickly shifted about, and given every facility 



268 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

for making the wilderness speedily habitable, but it was an 
unprecedented one in those. Something like it in the way 
of figures had occurred simultaneously in Kentucky. There, 
however, one sees but the natural breaking of the tide of 
civilisation, forced by normal pressure over the Alleghanies ; 
picturesque enough in detail, more so indeed in the individual 
environment of its pioneers than was the case with the early 
Anglo-Canadian settlers, entombed as they were for years 
between slowly yielding forest walls that, in a densely 
timbered, non-mountainous country, so ruthlessly and for so 
long shut out the world. For the forests of Kentucky, 
Tennessee, and the Ohio were much more open, the land as 
rich and richer in the river bottoms, the seasons longer, the 
climate less severe. Nor were there any natural parks of 
blue grass and white clover to relieve the uncompromising 
bristling antagonism of the Canadian bush. There was 
nothing, however, of the historical and social picturesque- 
ness in the horny-handed hordes who followed Boone, 
Clarke, and Sevier across the Alleghanies, that attaches to 
the U.E. settlement of Upper Canada. Not poor men 
moving westward to better themselves were these, but the 
survivors of a lost cause, pitchforked out of ease and pro- 
sperity into the wilderness to begin life again, and form as 
best they could a strange partnership with a small nation of 
seventeenth-century Frenchmen of differing faith, speech, 
laws and traditions. So far the founding of Upper Canada 
had been achieved, somewhat in this wise, by original U.E. 
loyalists, about eight thousand in all, with a rather smaller 
succeeding influx who are usually, though vaguely, described 
as ' later loyalists.' These last, however, contained a good 
many of the first U.E. exodus to Nova Scotia, attracted 
to Canada by reports of its superior fertility and brighter 
climate. The seventy thousand of 1806 were represented 
by the increase of these, which could hardly as yet have 
become normal, and by alien immigration, chiefly from the 
States. No great number of English had as yet come to 
Canada, nor indeed were they much in evidence till after 



IMMIGRATION 269 

the war of 181 2. The Highlanders, however, flocked in. 
Those of Johnston's Mohawk settlement, original loyalists, 
had settled at the eastern corner of the province — Grants, 
M'Leans, Mackays, Hays, M'Donnells, and others, while 
there came a little later from Scotland M'Gillies, Clanranald 
Macdonalds, Macphersons of Badenoch, and Camerons of 
Lochiel. It was not till 1804 that the large M'Donnell 
movement, the whole regiment of Glengarry Fencibles with 
their families, before alluded to, arrived and settled near 
their compatriots in the county of Glengarry. These last, 
and many of the others, were Roman Catholics, A few 
Catholic Irish had been introduced, while a great many 
disbanded soldiers were of that race and faith. But the 
more wholesale movement of them to Canada was not yet. 
Colonel Talbot of the 24th had broken ground on his own 
six thousand acre grant near the western end of Lake 
Erie, to launch out a little later into one of the largest 
private promoters of emigration and pioneers of Canadian 
civilisation of his or any day. There are many accounts of 
these early movements buried away in the back shelves of 
libraries, in which men and women who helped to lay the 
foundations of now populous colonies tell the tale of their 
early endeavours. Not * travellers' tales,' but those of work 
and hope and hardship, of humour and pathos, and of 
peculiar fascination, wholly aside from any literary qualities, 
to those of us who may know the fields as they look to-day 
of these old strivings. Talbot was notoriously eccentric, 
and was known as mad Dick Talbot, but mad or sane there 
are said to be nearly a quarter of a million souls now living 
on the twenty-eight townships that he acquired and opened 
for settlement. The anniversary of his birthday was cele- 
brated as ' Founder's Day ' for years after the Colonel had 
departed from the scene, a touch of sentiment that in the 
somewhat hard atmosphere of Upper Canadian story is 
unusual. A still more picturesque and equally worthy 
figure of this period, though he left slight impress on 
Ontario, was the fifth Lord Selkirk already mentioned, an 



270 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

able, upright, and warm-hearted young man of ample means 
and a fine taste for colonising. Great clearances were going 
on in Sutherlandshire in his youth, and it cannot be denied 
that the Highland chieftain turned landlord showed a great 
deal less regard, when the question of profits came in, for 
the people who would have died for him or his ancestors, 
than an unromantic Yorkshire landlord would have shown 
for mere prosaic copyhold tenants had they stood in his 
way. Selkirk, who was not a Highland chief, took pity on 
the somewhat mercilessly evicted tenants of those who were. 
Recognising, however, to the full how much good might 
come out of evil, he tried the experiment of taking eight 
hundred of the Duchess of Sutherland's outcasts to a grant 
of his own on Prince Edward Island, which proved a com- 
plete success, and their descendants to-day form a prosperous 
fraction of the hundred thousand souls who compose that 
prosperous little island commonwealth. 

In 1803 Lord Selkirk purchased large tracts on the Grand 
River, and another about Chatham in Upper Canada, 
offering at the same time to make a road from one to the 
other right through the peninsula. But he was unable to come 
to terms with the Government at York, and did little him- 
self towards settling these lands. It was during and after 
the war that he made such a stir with his fresh colony on 
the remote prairie near the present Winnipeg, and as a large 
Hudsons Bay stockholder, brought about those dramatic and 
sanguinary little episodes around Fort Garry between the 
older Company and its Montreal rivals, the Nor'- Westers, 
who struggled hard to prevent any settlement of farmers. 

In a sense Lord Selkirk was the founder of the present 
Province of Manitoba, though sixty years were to elapse 
before his isolated quasi-agricultural community on the Red 
River were to come within the purview of Canadian states- 
men, and before the quiet efforts of the united fur com- 
panies to belittle the agricultural capacities of their vast 
domain were to be overcome by the practical demonstration 
made possible by the Canadian Pacific railroad. 



APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 271 



CHAPTER XI 

THE APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 

The time was now approaching when the course of 
Canadian development was to be arrested by a call more 
urgent, and the makers of the country were to be summoned 
from desk and plough to fight with the sword against great 
odds for what their axes had won. Formidable, however, 
as was the prospect, it at least cannot be said that, when 
the hour of trial arrived, it came as a surprise, though the 
military condition of Canada, so far as Great Britain was 
responsible for it, might well bear that interpretation. But 
to clear the ground in these pages for the war of 1 812, we 
must leave Upper Canada, which was to be the principal 
scene of action, and get back again to the better point of 
outlook at Quebec, which, in the main, as an old province 
with more time for disputation, had not enjoyed quite the 
same political repose as its younger and busier sister. The 
elements of potential friction and disagreement were always 
face to face in the two cities of the Lower Province where 
its pulse beat. In Upper Canada the race problem was 
absent. An oligarchical calm reigned in its rude little capital. 
The opposition had not yet come out of the woods, where 
they were still inarticulate and struggling for their living. 
There had been a trifling breeze even there. An imported 
English circuit judge with popular sympathies had met the 
grievances of the rural grand juries a little more than half 
way, and got himself elected to the House of Assembly for 
the purpose of denouncing what he conceived to be irregu- 



272 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

larities and high-handed proceedings. He was an Irishman, 
and if there was some justice in his reflections, his ways 
were those of a demagogue and egotist, certainly not of a 
judge. The Government party, however, were too strong 
for him, and had him recalled. His friend and abettor, 
another Irish barrister, one Weeks, had graduated as an 
election agent in the service of Aaron Burr when the latter 
missed the Presidency by Hamilton's efforts, and shot him 
for it, as every one knows. Weeks, in imitation perhaps of 
his late patron, and with equally unjustifiable provocation, 
called out Mr. Dickson, already mentioned as of the Gover- 
nor's Council. But fortunately for the town and district of 
Gait, which, as already mentioned, owes its origin to this 
Scottish gentleman, the wrong man was not shot this time, 
while the other was killed on the spot. Yet another Irish- 
man, Joseph Wilcocks, though sheriff of the Home district, 
had shown his native genius for agitation against both real 
and imaginary abuses in a newspaper called the Freeman's 
Journal, started in the people's cause in 1807. He too 
entered the House of Assembly, and spoke so freely that 
the Government laid him by the heels in York gaol. This 
made a martyr of him, and he was returned again, but died 
fighting against Canada in the coming war. Wyatt, the 
Surveyor-General, also appointed by the Home Government 
and hailing from Ireland, was of the same faction. He too 
displayed that particular political bent which the air of 
America seems to generate in his type, and expelled the 
chief clerk of his department, a Crown servant and a U.E. 
loyalist, for voting against his friends. This of course was 
altogether too much, and rightly so, for the Government, 
and Wyatt proving contumacious, was sent about his 
business, which apparently took him to New York, where 
he loudly proclaimed the people of Canada to be ripe for 
rebellion. For most of these importations Castlereagh 
appears to have been responsible, and one might almost 
fancy he had made a point of dumping troublesome local 
firebrands on to the colonial establishments. The first of 



APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 273 

the long roll of impressionist travel writers now made his 
appearance in Canada, and at the same time no little sensa- 
tion among the reading public at home — one John Mills 
Jackson — so much so indeed that questions were asked in 
the House of Commons, and the Government went to the 
trouble of asking Gore for material to refute the author's 
statements. .This was not difficult, as Mr. Jackson's arraign- 
ment of the administration of Upper Canada is obviously to 
the discriminating reader not worth powder and shot. He 
would like to have bought land in the province, he declares, 
but for the fact that neither his person nor his property 
would have been safe — whether from wolves or U.E. 
loyalists is not quite clear ! But he made such a pother in 
England that the Upper Canada legislature thought it worth 
while by a unanimous vote to declare his little book to be ' a 
false, scandalous, and malicious libel containing expressions 
of the most unexampled insolence and contumely towards 
His Majesty's Government in the province and on the House 
of Assembly and the Courts of Justice therein, and tending 
to alienate the affections of the people and to incite them to 
insurrection. 5 At any rate the statements of Mr. John Mills 
Jackson were quite successfully refuted. 

As I have said, it was no time now for Wilcockses and 
Thorpes, for Weekses and Wyatts, whatever may have been 
their theories on the qualifications for office or hereditary 
rights, but for United Empire loyalists of a thoroughgoing 
unequivocal stamp. Whether Upper or Lower Canada 
were in the most doleful condition to face the ever impend- 
ing war and repel an American invasion would have been 
an interesting speculation in the years preceding it. Twenty 
or thirty thousand recent American importations of no 
definite political attachments were in the former, in the 
latter perhaps a third of that number, with that always incal- 
culable factor and inscrutable element the Canadian habitant. 
In Quebec too the seigniors of standing and weight had 
been reduced to a handful, while the bourgeoisie had gained 
immensely in numbers and influence, and in their ranks 

S 



274 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

was now to be found a somewhat vociferous element, who 
were on bad terms with the Government and anxious to 
arouse disaffection. This is generally regarded as in part 
the fault of poor old Sir James Craig, who came out as 
Governor-in-Chief in 1808. Craig is assuredly the black 
sheep of Canadian Governors in the popular mind. He too 
was a Scotsman of good family. Though barely sixty he 
must have been old for his years, due no doubt to the fact 
that he was suffering from dropsy, and indeed he left Canada 
at the close of his term a dying man. He had been in the 
army from boyhood and fought with credit all over the 
world, in Europe, India, and America, and held important 
commands. It was for this reason, and in anticipation 
of trouble with the United States, that he was sent to 
Canada. Craig was pre-eminently a soldier and a capable 
one, straightforward, honest and well-meaning. He had no 
pretension, however, to be a statesman, unless Tory prin- 
ciples of an unshakable nature constitute one. His por- 
traits seem instinct with his personality such as it has come 
to us ; a short, stout man with a not unkindly but heavy 
inflexible face. ' Severe but dignified,' says Christie, who 
knew him, ' while his manners in society were frank, affable 
and polished.' Had the clock of his destiny been put on 
four years, and had he arrived in Quebec a sound man the 
year he left it a dying unregretted one, Craig would have 
been invaluable as a military chief. In any case he was a 
little unfortunate. He found the racial bitterness that 
became unhappily perennial thoroughly aroused ; an un- 
comfortable three-cornered social atmosphere, and a mainly 
French legislative Assembly, aspiring through inexperience 
to more than those reasonable rights of which it was balked 
by an unimpressionable Executive. In short, the troubles 
of which Durham wrote so eloquently forty years later had 
already begun, and Craig, with many sterling qualities, 
which posterity has at the best ignored, was not the ruler to 
assuage them. 

Ryland, perhaps the cleverest man in the Canada of his 



APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 275 

day, and a permanent secretary and adviser of Governors, 
exercised great influence over his chief, and of Ryland's 
wholesale Anglicising policy I have already said something. 
Mention too has been made of the newspaper Le Cana- 
dienne^ started to represent French aspirations and those of 
the majority in the Assembly. Like most publications of 
the kind at that day it ran to violent extremes, and a press 
war was raging when Craig arrived, in which both parties 
and both races were feeding with printed abuse the bitter- 
ness that had already sprung up between them. His first 
duties lay in organising the militia and in enforcing the 
alien and sedition Act, which was now running in both 
provinces and much facilitated the arrest of persons sus- 
pected of promulgating seditious opinions. He appears to 
have injured the amour propre of the popular House by 
lecturing them on their waste of public time in irrelevant 
disputations, in which he was probably quite right, for they 
were very raw. Their lawyers had seized with enthusiasm 
on the letter of the British Constitution, but through lack no 
doubt of tradition and heredity had failed to appreciate its 
limitations, and contracted a notion that their House was 
legally constituted the sole and final arbiter of the country's 
destiny. They had gone so far as to summon before the 
bar of the House certain newspaper editors on the Govern- 
ment side for criticising their conduct. Pretensions that 
even in these days of demos-worship would not be tolerated, 
were grotesquely premature in the face of an Upper House 
that had no scruple in throwing out any bill, and a perfectly 
irresponsible Executive. The British minority in the House, 
though on some other accounts far from contented, had no 
conception of a colony, which was still one of the pawns in 
a war-distracted world, being handed over to a majority 
elected by French Canadian habitants. ' The members believe 
or affect to believe,' wrote Craig to Castlereagh, ' that there 
exists a ministry here, and that in the imitation of the con- 
stitution of Great Britain that ministry is responsible to 
them for the conduct of government. It is not necessary 



276 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

to point out to your lordships the steps to which such an 
idea may lead them.' The actual measures wrangled over 
hardly matter here. As a sample of their grasp of parlia- 
mentary institutions, a perfectly reasonable bill that judges 
should be excluded was sent back from the Council 
approved of, with the amendment only that the bill should 
not take effect till the next election. The Lower House took 
no notice of this, but its majority passed a resolution that 
Judge de Bonne, who usually voted against them, could no 
longer hold his seat. They also refused to admit a Jew 
merchant twice elected for Three Rivers. Craig, on the 
strength of their ' unconstitutional disfranchisement of a 
large portion of His Majesty's subjects,' to wit Three Rivers, 
and of evicting from his seat in the House another member, 
the Judge above mentioned, without any legal justification 
for the act whatever, dissolved them. He then, after his 
fashion, read them a not altogether superfluous homily. 
■ They had wasted,' he told them, ' in fruitless debates, excited 
by private and personal animosity or by frivolous contest 
upon trivial matters, that time and talent to which within 
their walls the public had an exclusive title. The abuse of 
their functions they had preferred to the high and important 
duties which they owed to their Sovereign and to their con- 
stituents. So much of intemperate heat had been manifested 
in all their proceedings, and they had shown so prolonged 
an attitude of disrespect, that he felt the necessity of dis- 
solving them and taking the sense of the country upon their 
conduct.' A considerable part of the country wholly 
approved of Craig's action. With all reasonable men the 
Assembly had put itself out of court. But Le Canadienne 
became more violent than ever. Craig had already broken 
hopelessly with it by depriving five militia officers associated 
with the paper of their commissions, among them Colonel 
Panet, who for years had been Speaker of the House. 
Craig had doubtless been ill-advised, but in the constant 
presence of seditious aliens from France or the United 
States and the peril of the times, suspicions were easily 



APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 277 

aroused. It is not probable that any of these persons 
harboured disloyal designs, or were animated by anything 
worse than opposition to the Legislative Council and the 
general racial soreness that had now unfortunately become 
the leading note in political and social life. The French 
organ, however, expressed this in the shape of a hostility to 
everything British that may well have made an old soldier 
doubt if its staff were fitting men to lead troops, themselves 
perhaps lukewarm, against Britain's foes. It is extraordinarily 
difficult, however, to determine he line between mere local 
passions and revolutionary senuments. The personality of 
the King for one thing meant a great deal to the French 
CanHian of those days. Not for a moment that his suc- 
cessor to-day earns any less measure of respect ; but it 
needs no saying that the attitude of that period was more 
personal, above all with these descendants of seventeenth- 
century Frenchmen. It is tolerably certain that Panet, 
Badeau (the leader of the House), and others were dissatis- 
fied only with the administration, though they pitched their 
objection in the heated key which both parties had adopted 
towards each other. To grant a Constitution and a popular 
House, and withhold at the same time responsible govern- 
ment and the chief power of the purse, is to invite criticism, 
discontent and agitation, and this was now happening in 
every North American colony left to the British Crown. It 
would certainly have been unwise thus early and in the dis- 
turbed state of the world to have given such full powers to 
Lower Canada. The French would in the main have been 
content for a long time with the Quebec Act of 1774. But 
the British settlers would certainly have been content with 
nothing less than the Canada Act of 1791, and now their 
representatives with some exceptions fell into line with 
racial instincts and upheld the Executive rather as the ex- 
ponent of English ideas than for any love of it. The Con- 
stitution had in fact seemed to give the people through 
their Assembly much more than they actually got. They 
discovered in time that they were practically powerless, and 



278 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

as they could do little else set to work to make themselves 
as unpleasant as they knew how to be. 

One leading cause of this racial bitterness had been the 
proposal in Milnes' time by the party of the merchants of a 
land tax, coupled with some reduction in the customs duty. 
This was regarded by the French farmers as an invidious 
impost. The compensating reduction in some articles of 
commerce either did not appeal to them or did not affect 
them, since they bought scarcely anything. Craig was now 
ill-advised enough, with the full connivance, however, of his 
Executive, to seize the press of the Canadienne and commit 
the printer, together with Messrs. Bedard, Blanchet, and 
Taschereau, to prison under the Sedition Act. Steps were 
taken as if a rising had been contemplated, guards increased, 
and the city patrolled. So far as anything of this kind was 
concerned, the whole thing was a mare's nest. Craig issued 
a long proclamation summarising in general terms the 
critical condition of the country as regards alien foes and 
potential ones, and pointing out the danger at such a time 
of seditious writings being disseminated throughout the 
colony. He refuted the reports, some of them in detail, 
that had been spread concerning himself and his intentions, 
and then with some pathos the somewhat stern but by no 
means hard-hearted old Tory continues in allusion to these 
reports : ' Is it for myself that I should oppress you? For what 
should I oppress you ? Is it from ambition ? What can you give 
me? Is it for power? Alas,my good friends, with a life ebbing 
out slowly to its period, under pressure of disease acquired in 
the service of my country, I look only to pass what it may 
please God to suffer to remain of it in the comfort of retire- 
ment among my friends, and I remain among you only in 
obedience to the command of my King.' All this was in 
1810, during the course of which year Craig sent Ryland to 
England to put the state of affairs before the Government. 
One may almost doubt if it were not more accurate to say that 
Ryland persuaded Craig to allow him to undertake such a 
mission. His letters to his chief from England are pro- 



APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 279 

foundly interesting as evidence of the condition of Lower 
Canada viewed through the spectacles of the ablest of the 
extreme British party. Ryland's ability seems to have 
been at once recognised by Perceval, who was then Prime 
Minister, and he was treated with extreme confidence and 
courtesy by ministers in general, though his views, nomin- 
ally Craig's, were not adopted, and in the main were im- 
possible. Briefly, they were to abolish the Constitution, do 
away with the popular Assembly, break the power of the 
Catholic Church by giving its entire patronage to the Crown, 
and incidentally to resume for the Crown the considerable 
revenues of the Seminary of Montreal. Ryland was on one 
occasion admitted to a cabinet council. His experience 
and information, biased as it was, appealed strongly to the 
Government, though no thought of adopting his reactionary 
views was entertained. 

The Assembly of Quebec in their anxiety for financial 
authority had offered to take the whole expenses of the 
civil list. The provincial expenditure was now approxi- 
mately £45, 000, the revenue about three-fourths of that 
amount, the deficit being found by the Crown to the great 
convenience of good government from its own point of 
view. Indeed it must be admitted that if the power of 
producing a deadlock had been conceded to the popular 
House at this early period, the result would almost certainly 
have been disastrous. 

Though the troubles of this period may be safely classed 
as domestic ones, with no sinister views against the British 
Crown among any responsible faction, short of that the 
tension was very acute. We have a picture of it among 
others drawn without any heat whatever by the kindly- 
hand of Philip de Gaspe in his memoirs, which are those of 
an elderly man recalling in after times of peace and amity 
the memories of a happy and sociable French youth of the 
upper class who knew everybody of both factions and 
nationalities and was obviously a persona grata with all. 
Nephew of the well-known seignior Charles de Lanaudiere, 



280 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

Dorchester's favourite aide-de-camp and in Craig's day an 
extremely Tory member of his Legislative Council, educated 
and resident in Quebec, De Gaspe was also intimate with 
the heady spirits of Le Canadienne and at the same time a 
welcome guest at the mess of British regiments and a 
personal friend of many of the members. Christie, the 
British historian of Lower Canada, was his contemporary 
and friend, so between the historian and the raconteur, 
to say nothing of state papers and other private evidence, 
we have testimony to the state of things existing before the 
war of 1812, in which the few interested in what to the 
reader may seem a small and far-away question may find 
ample entertainment. To summarise it all in brief is not 
easy. I have alluded to the situation as a three-cornered 
one. There is no doubt that the bureaucracy, which 
though mostly British, either native or imported, contained 
a few Frenchmen, were carrying things with a high hand. 
Both nationalities outside the charmed circle smarted from 
it, and both were equally snubbed. The resentment of the 
French, for which we cannot blame them, took so strong 
a turn that it seems to have thrown the British minority, 
not wholly out of accord with them, into the hands of a 
clique which gave them little in return and under other 
circumstances would have provoked their hostility. Racial 
lines, which had upon the whole been hitherto no sharper 
than difference of temperament, language and religion made 
inevitable, and softened by a considerable share of the 
amenities, now became painfully defined and mutual abuse 
the order of the day. Social relations grew very strained, 
and the women of the privileged class, as one can well 
imagine, aggravated the evil. In the days of Murray the 
ladies of the garrison, as the experiences related in Frances 
Brooke's letters show us, mixed as easily as the lingual 
difficulty would allow with the French society of that time. 
Their husbands and men friends at any rate seem to have 
given them no alternative even had pressure been required, 
of which there is no evidence. But now all this seems to 



APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 281 

have been altered. The daughters of country squires and 
parsons and professional men who followed the drum of 
the five regiments quartered in Canada had an opportunity, 
in consort with the wives of the small political oligarchy, of 
regarding themselves as a caste apart, and under the aegis as 
it were of Government House. This was not only gratifying 
to the average feminine instinct, but in a majority of cases 
had no doubt the further charm of novelty. Here too the 
situation harmonised with the somewhat complacent and 
unsympathetic temperament of the average Briton, male or 
female, and his instinctively frigid attitude towards the 
alien of his own or any other race, to whom then as now 
he was apt to show his worst side. The ladies were of 
course merely an aggravating note in the general hauteur 
that it became the fashion to observe towards all who were 
not inside the ring. A few French families of the higher 
sort were within it, but the majority of those socially 
eligible fell away in the face of the mutual recriminations 
between French and English that had been stirred up in 
Parliament and the Press. It did not take much to make 
a social breach between two elements so diverse in tempera- 
ment and associations, and there had been for a long time 
no chatelaine at Government House to keep such matters 
in hand. To this day there is no social fusion of any 
moment between British and French in Canada, though the 
old rancour and the cause for it is dead. But in the first 
decade of the nineteenth century things in all centres of 
life in the Lower Province had got into a most parlous con- 
dition. The British of Quebec and Montreal had been 
provoked by the language of the French press and the 
pretensions of the Assembly into a revival of the old feeling 
that the French were a conquered people who had been 
treated far too well and were destitute of all gratitude. It 
is idle, with the superior knowledge and aloof position of a 
hundred years, to sneer at what seems bigotry and prejudice. 
It is much more interesting to read the sentiments and 
grievances of both sides, and when you have done so you 



282 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

will probably feel how natural and even logical their re- 
spective points of view were. But the British of the cities, 
now containing quite a numerous well-to-do and well- 
educated element, though Gallophobes just now of the 
most extreme kind, were smarting at the same time from 
the untoward exclusiveness of the official clique. Craig 
did his best and gave entertainments at his charming 
country house perched above the river towards Cap Rouge 
and now known as Spencer Wood, where he was affable to 
all. One great compensation, however, cheered the years 
immediately preceding the war, and that was prosperity, 
for the embargo laid by the Washington Government on 
their shipping had brought nothing but profit to their 
neighbours. The demand for lumber, too, now that the 
United States were shut out of the field and European seas 
so frequently unsafe for the trader, greatly stimulated that 
business in Canada. It is generally held that the lumber 
trade, as Canada's greatest industry for the next three- 
quarters of a century and the source of so much individual 
wealth, took its rise from this period. 

Craig did not let the slight hold he had on life interfere 
with his endeavours to get Canada placed in a proper con- 
dition of defence, for war was looked upon now as inevitable. 
He had only about four thousand regulars in the two 
provinces, and thrice that number, he wrote, would be 
required to defend the Canadas, besides artillery and some 
frigates and gunboats. Like Dorchester, he declared that 
Quebec at all hazards must be held, as it would always be 
a base whence the British could recover any losses they might 
suffer in the interior. At the entrance of the Champlain 
approach to Canada there were no defences worth mention- 
ing, Ile-aux-Noix and St. John's had disappeared, and 
Chambly was no use against heavy artillery, The Ameri- 
cans were now at war again with the Indians, and General 
Harrison was surprised and defeated at Tippecanoe near 
Vincennes with a loss of nearly a fifth of his force. Craig, 
who for Canada's sake had only too good reason to dread an 






APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 283 

attack on her borders, and had done his utmost to keep the 
Indians from a war which would strain the Anglo-American 
situation still further, was accused by the war party of 
inciting them, as his predecessors with always the same 
good cause to dread a border war had been accused with 
wearisome reiteration. In 181 1, however, his wasting health 
compelled him to resign without waiting for formal leave 
from England. So nominating Mr. Dunn as his representa- 
tive, he sailed in June, and in spite of all the invective that 
chroniclers have showered upon the honest if obstinate old 
Tory, able if misguided, the people unhitched the horses 
from his carriage and dragged him through cheering crowds 
to the wharf, whence the Amelia frigate took him home to 
die within six months. 

Bad farming seems to have begun to tell upon the lands 
of the French seigniories. Travellers tell us how the 
habitant of those days flung his manure heap into the 
St. Lawrence, and if this method of procedure, so astonish- 
ing in the case of a small cultivator, was not universal, Craig 
wrote that the province in this particular was going back 
while the rest of the world was moving forward. But as 
some compensation, roads had now been opened to the 
Eastern Townships, whence an altogether more enterprising 
people were already sending such supplies of meat and 
grain to Quebec and Montreal as to lower the prices while 
the quality was greatly improved. The first steamboat too 
plied upon the St. Lawrence in Craig's time. De Gaspe tells 
us how he and Christie the historian made one of the first 
trips in it at the lightning speed of four miles an hour. 
Quebec and Montreal were far apart in those days, while 
Toronto was in the wilderness indeed. The credit of this 
early enterprise is due to John Molson, the founder of the 
well-known banking family of Montreal. He was a 
Lincolnshire squire who sold his patrimony of Snake Hall 
near Moulton and started a brewery at Montreal. His 
steamboat enterprise immediately followed Fulton's first 
and famous one on the Hudson. He began with a loss of 



284 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

£3000, but much more than recovered it by the other 
vessels he subsequently built and which did good service 
as transports in the coming war. Mr. Kingsford writes with 
great indignation that this courageous and successful 
pioneer of steam should in that capacity have been con- 
signed by posterity to oblivion. The founder, however, of 
the bank that bears his name and has long been one of 
the national institutions of Canada, is not without compensa- 
tion for any injustice done to his mechanical genius and 
enterprise. 

Once again a Swiss, and again of that distinguished band 
who made the 60th Rifles or the Royal Americans, was to 
imprint his name on Canada. Sir George Prevost, however, 
was of the second generation, for it was his father who 
had been the comrade of Haldimand, of Bouquet, and of 
Cramahe. He had been severely wounded on the Plains 
of Abraham, and twenty years later defended Savannah 
against the French fleet and the Congress troops. The 
son had done the same for Dominica in the current war with 
Napoleon and in the year of Trafalgar, by which feat he 
had won a baronetcy, and later on the lieutenant-governor- 
ship of Nova Scotia. While in that command he had 
assisted in the capture of Martinique, and at Halifax been 
popular with the Nova Scotians who, like the Canadians, 
were discovering that an elective Assembly did not neces- 
sarily mean popular government. A group of powerful 
U.E. families managed the affairs of the Maritime Pro- 
vinces, much as their prototypes were beginning to do 
in Upper Canada and their equivalents under more heated 
conditions already did at Quebec. But as we have said, the 
system at this time had its obviously good points. 

Prevost was born in his father's regiment while it was 
quartered in or near New York during that brief dozen or 
so of years when England was in peaceful enjoyment of 
both Canada and the future United States. He inherited 
wealth from his mother, had advantages of person and 
manner, and spoke French like a native. He was a great 



APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 285 

contrast to Craig, and pleased the Canadians, both English 
and French, mightily. Before they had finished with him, 
however, they must have sighed for poor old Craig. 
Prevost was active, well-meaning and clever, but he had 
later on to fill a breach that wanted something more. For 
the present he did well enough. He went the round of the 
frontier posts, and found them as reported quite defenceless, 
for it was then thought that the Champlain entrance, not 
Upper Canada, was the likely point of attack. We must 
leave Prevost here in the brief interval of peace yet remain- 
ing, to meet his legislature and gently chide the Lower 
House for harping as they did on past personalities, instead 
of bending their attention to the urgent affairs of the 
moment. But the Assembly were in no mood for this. 
They mutilated a bill sent down from the Council for the 
better government of the country out of all recognition, and 
passed one for payment of members which the Council in 
their turn extinguished. 

The Lower House had appointed committees to right 
the wrongs they held were being done when war fell upon 
them and gave them yet more urgent things to think 
about. For when all has been said, they were very few 
Canadians who wanted to be either Yankee or Napoleonic 
Frenchmen. The Legislative Council too had by the mere 
flight of time accumulated such a concrete weight of years 
and service, with which of course their sense of importance 
had kept pace, as to become not only a peculiar irritant to 
the flamboyant and youthful reformer, but almost a menace 
to their friends or rather to the safe and sound principles 
they advocated. The Crown lawyers were moved to sug- 
gest fresh blood, and a good many new appointments were 
made to the august company of greybeards. Gore had left 
Upper Canada on leave of absence about the same time as 
Craig sailed from Quebec, and that excellent soldier and 
potential successor in an only less degree to Wolfe's 
mantle, namely, Isaac Brock, was now in a good hour sent 
to Upper Canada as civil administrator and military chief. 



286 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

This I think sufficiently clears the ground of all the main 
facts of the situation in Canada, for a brief glance at those 
doings in the great world without, which meant more per- 
haps to her than to almost any country in either Continent 
involved in that world-wide struggle. I do not wish to 
involve the reader of these pages in the maze of the great 
Napoleonic contest — a subject more voluminously treated 
and within easier reach of the average man's hand than any 
other in history. It is my object here to tell a so far rather 
obscure tale, and one that has been the reverse of accessible 
in any shape but that of bare outline, and I have en- 
deavoured in doing so to exclude all world-politics and 
extraneous events that have not borne directly on the 
Canadas. So much is said nowadays of sea power in 
history, I am not sure that it is quite enough merely to 
remind the reader, if indeed he needed it, that the immunity 
of so poorly defended a city as Quebec from England's 
enemies was largely due to the latter's superiority at sea, 
though it is a less obvious fact and more interesting reflec- 
tion what America would have said if a strong French 
force had slipped in and planted the tricolour on the ram- 
parts. It was the British sea power at any rate that baffled 
and finally broke Napoleon, and from the year 1792 till 
18 12, with the trifling interval of the peace of Amiens, the 
struggles of these two giants kept the Americans in a 
continual state of irritation by the losses direct and indirect 
it entailed upon them. Great Britain began in 1793 with 
the Orders in Council decreeing that neutral ships found 
carrying bread-stuffs to France or any country occupied by 
French armies should be brought to England and their 
cargoes there sold, or as an alternative that security should 
be given against the supply being taken to a French port. 
Soon after this further orders were issued applying the 
same code to ships carrying goods either to or from the 
French colonies. This touched the American carrying 
trade to the quick, and a further aggravation was to follow 
almost immediately in the exercise by British ships of the 



APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 287 

right of searching American vessels either of the navy or 
mercantile marine for deserters, and for impressing British 
seamen found therein. These conditions not unnaturally 
caused intense irritation in America, but Jay's treaty in 
1785, alluded to in a former chapter as raising such a storm 
from the Democratic party in the States, practically put an 
end for a time to these annoyances, and was a fair and 
equitable one. The North were fully satisfied, but the South, 
led by Jefferson and fanatically anti-British, had never in- 
tended to be. The ' sons of liberty ' in those districts had 
lost a great many negro slaves in the war, and Jay's treaty 
contained the egregious stipulation that they should pay 
their old debts to the British merchants. But the wrath of 
France with her former allies was greater than ever, while 
that of the Democrats was intense at being bound over to 
amity with Great Britain. For many years the insulting 
treatment of the American Government and American ships 
by France tried the Gallophiles sorely and confirmed the 
others in the dislike, which the horrors of the Revolution 
and the impertinences of Genet and his successors had 
provoked. With Napoleon, however, as first consul, the 
French attitude towards America changed, and though it 
made no impression on the utterly alienated North — speak- 
ing broadly — it rekindled the Gallic fervour and Anglo- 
phobia of the South. Though the United Kingdom, with 
a population of eighteen millions, had to keep a large army 
of three hundred thousand men on foot, her fleet in this 
death grapple was her chief shield and support, and that 
required nearly half as many sailors. The Americans with 
the high wages and abounding opportunities that a new 
country offers to the poor, found it no easy thing to man 
their ships, while the British seaman under the temptation 
of better pay was often ready enough to serve in them. 

In 1806 Great Britain declared the whole north coast 
from Brest to the Elbe to be in a state of blockade, while 
Napoleon replied with the Berlin decrees proclaiming the 
British Isles to be under the same ban. But Britain could 



288 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

enforce her ordinances, while Napoleon, his navy almost 
swept from the ocean, had to content himself with the 
thunder only of his utterances. 

Great Britain soon afterwards forbade all neutral trade 
with France or her allies. Napoleon replied with the Milan 
decrees, which was only yet more empty noise, and forced 
Holland and Spain, then in his grip, to do likewise. 

In 1806 the Washington Government, hit in its commerce 
by the strict enforcement by England of its sea policy, 
retaliated with a non-import measure to be kept back, how- 
ever, till an effort at some understanding had been made. 
This was attempted and with success by Monroe, the 
United States minister, and Pinkney, a favourable com- 
mercial treaty being effected. Upon the impressment and 
right of search question, however, Great Britain stood firm. 
She considered it vital to her naval efficiency, and conse- 
quently to her struggle for existence with half Europe. She 
promised, however, consideration in carrying it out, and the 
terms were accepted. It should be stated, moreover, that 
this was not regarded as an unnatural proceeding in those 
days, nor was it yet admitted that men could abjure their 
country by hastily taking out papers of naturalisation in a 
foreign one. Jefferson, however, who was now President, 
and rabid as ever against England, took the unjustifiable 
step of suppressing the treaty and refusing to submit it to 
the Senate for ratification. At this moment too occurred 
the unfortunate incident of the Chesapeake and the 
Leopard^ in which the latter, a fifty-gun ship, by the 
orders of Admiral Berkely, demanded delivery of three 
deserters known to be on the American frigate. On 
the latter's refusal to surrender them, the Leopard poured 
several broadsides into her, killing three men, and wounding 
eighteen. The British Government disavowed the act, and 
Berkely was recalled, but it raised a fresh storm in the 
United States. Monroe and Pinkney were sent back to 
demand reparation, and above all abandonment of the right 
of search. England was willing to go all reasonable 



APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 289 

lengths in the former matter, but would not yield in the 
latter. A treaty she declared had been already made at 
considerable trouble, and signed, only to be torn up by 
Jefferson with petulant and inconstitutional insult. Rela- 
tions now were more strained than ever, and the United 
States passed the Embargo Act at the end of 1807, which, 
after eighteen months of ill consequences to themselves 
and much comfort to Canada, was revoked. In 1809 the 
Washington Government requested the recall of Mr. Jack- 
son, the able young British Minister, who had succeeded 
the weak and foolish Erskine, and whose letters from 
America, together with those of his wife, are of great 
interest. Throughout these last years the give and take 
of more or less heated diplomatic exchanges went on 
between the United States and England, Napoleon always 
playing the former off against the latter. The Americans 
having purchased Louisiana from the French, the war party 
in power had no longer any ulterior purpose in being civil 
to England, and in any case, even had they not been 
obsessed with hatred of her, would have avoided any undue 
amenities lest they should offend Napoleon. The latter, 
brutal as were often his manners to their nation, arrogant 
to all nations as he had shown himself, was still the god of 
Jefferson and his party. Henry Clay was then his ardent 
follower, and was boasting in the bombastic western fashion 
natural to him that the Kentucky woodsmen alone would 
wipe out Canada. Young Calhoun of South Carolina, who 
forty years later did so much to bring on the war that 
shattered his State and section, was also on the committee 
of foreign relations, though only thirty. Most indeed of 
the leaders of the war party were young men. Great 
Britain seemed to them a declining Power. Corunna had 
appeared to seal the failure of the British arms in Spain, 
while Napoleon, triumphant everywhere, was marching his 
vast army on Russia, as the Americans thought, to com- 
plete his dominion over Europe. The non-importation 
measures adopted against Great Britain had been con- 

T 



290 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

currently put in force against France as a cheap sop to 
the peace party, since French ships had been virtually long 
driven from the sea. In 1810 the American minister, 
Armstrong, had been instructed to offer France, should she 
withdraw the Berlin and Milan decrees, and Great Britain 
fail to follow her example, a declaration of war on the part 
of the United States against the latter. In the same year 
the French Government informed Armstrong at Paris- that 
the decrees were abolished, but made no general statement 
to that effect. Reporting this to his Government, the 
Americans now demanded the withdrawal of the English 
Orders in Council, a measure the Government was not averse 
to, provided they had a proof that Napoleon had really 
taken the alleged step, which it turned out he did not 
actually do till nearly a year after the specified date. It 
was not till May 1812 that the British Government was 
furnished with the proof that Napoleon had withdrawn his 
decrees, and by that time war was practically resolved upon 
by the American Government and no leash could have 
held their followers. The British withdrawal of the Orders 
in Council was too late. There had been another collision 
at sea, the offending ship this time being an American, 
while a further source of irritation had been the divulgence 
of a perfectly legitimate but confidential correspondence 
carried on by Craig and a secret agent he had sent to the 
States to report upon the feeling there in regard to war. 
The latter was an Irish adventurer named Henry, who, not 
content with his pay, importuned the Government for a 
judgeship in Canada. Unsuccessful barristers from Eng- 
land or Ireland had been far from unknown in these posts. 
But here was a man, wrote the indignant Gore to his 
Government, who had not even a legal education, and was 
moreover a citizen of the United States — in short a sheer 
adventurer. So Henry sold the correspondence directly 
or indirectly to Madison for a large sum variously quoted, 
and though there was nothing in it but a summary of local 
opinion on the situation, it helped to further inflame the 



APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 291 

excitable minds of a House practically elected for the pur- 
pose of declaring war. The aversion of the North to a 
rupture with Great Britain was naturally dealt with in 
these letters, and the free language often used in the dis- 
sentient States as to a secession from the Union naturally 
made the most of. This enabled the war party to raise the 
further cry of the Union in danger, which fifty years later 
was to drown their own secession efforts in rivers of blood. 
It was hardly needed. Madison not so rabid as Jefferson, 
nor a vociferous ' war-hawk,' as the term went, like Henry 
Clay, had been himself inclined to a compromise. But 
before his election in 181 1 he had been given formal in- 
timation that he would be accepted as the Democratic 
candidate only as a war President. So this not very 
imposing but clever and well-meaning Virginia squire had 
nothing for it but to provoke a war, which by an irony of 
fate is even still in the United States frequently called after 
his name. France, it may be noted, had recently made a 
bonfire of one hundred and thirty confiscated American 
ships worth a million and a half sterling. This, said Clay 
complacently in a war speech in Congress, did not cause 
them embarrassment. They had complete proof, he de- 
clared, that Great Britain would do everything to destroy 
them. 

Great Britain as a matter of fact was thinking very little 
about them, too little indeed. She had her hands a great 
deal more than full struggling single-handed with the would- 
be despot of the world, and at that moment none too hope- 
fully, as the latter was bound for Russia, which he was 
expected, in America at any rate, to annex, before devoting 
his whole powers to the extinction of Great Britain. This 
was the moment chosen by a nation, or part of a nation, 
sprung from her loins, and who had derived not merely 
her blood and names but every characteristic that had made 
them what they were, from the mother-country, to fly at 
her throat, and in company too with such an ally! The 
better part of the nation, averse to war on practical grounds 



292 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

as they were, felt this also. ' War is no terrible thing,' 
shouted Henry Clay while urging its declaration in Congress. 
1 There was no terror in it but its novelty.' Clay had never 
seen war, and was never likely to. Moreover, such material 
interests as he may have had, were fairly safe in Kentucky. 
Perhaps he learned something about it in the conflict he 
helped to provoke, for the rest of his political career was 
conspicuous for its compromises. In spite of the protests 
that sounded loud from the more enlightened and responsible 
States, the bill for the declaration of war passed both 
Houses on June 18, 1812, but a day or two before the 
Orders in Council had been revoked by the British Govern- 
ment, who had lost very little time in taking the step after 
receiving proof of Napoleon's concessions. But the news 
of this only arrived after hostilities had begun; and what the 
Democrats wanted was not a good pretext for peace, which 
even then could have been arranged, but war to relieve the 
pent-up passions into which they had for so long been 
lashing themselves. One obstacle, however, even then might 
have intervened, for before the British general at the front 
received the news the first ' army of invasion ' were cooling 
their heels as prisoners within his lines. 

The indictments against Great Britain were in the first 
place her exercise of the right of overhauling and searching 
vessels on the high seas ; secondly, her interference with 
trade by Orders in Council, and lastly, her supposed incite- 
ment of the western Indians. This we know was, so far as 
responsible people are concerned, a figment of the imagina- 
tion, a trite and hoary shibboleth that had done duty for two 
decades. The first cause, as we have seen, was withdrawn 
the day before war was declared, and only thus tardily, for 
good reasons already given. The second was insisted upon 
by Great Britain, and in the treaty of peace three years later 
was not so much as mentioned. Canada was the real object 
of the war-hawks, not greatly concerned themselves with 
seaports or maritime interests on which the brunt of the 
strife would fall. They abandoned their coerced partners to 



APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 293 

that share of the business and prepared for a triumphant 
promenade into Canada. They scarcely wanted soldiers, 
so the Secretary for War declared, but only officers, as the 
Canadians would rise as one man. They had forgotten, or 
at any rate their orators had forgotten, the U.E. loyalists, 
who of all men in the world might have been counted upon 
for the most desperate resistance. But with their many 
virtues there was always a certain fatuity concerning outside 
matters in the old south and west. Living beyond the 
influence of the main current of the world's life, which in a 
manner washed the Atlantic States to the north of them, 
they had all the prejudices and vanity of an extreme 
provincialism. They had consequently no proper standard 
by which to judge outsiders, and as a mass were not qualified 
to interpret the sense of international affairs, garbled and 
distorted views of which found easy credence among men 
who were almost entirely agriculturists, had little personal 
traffic with the outside world, and had few channels of 
communication even with one another. Save for a small 
class, scarcely less provincial though educated, the States 
that mostly followed Madison had no intellectual life, no 
newspapers worth mentioning, no schools to speak of, no 
touch with the world into whose vast struggle they were so 
eager to fling themselves with a naive confidence. They 
had never as a mass understood even the Seven Years' War 
which had threatened their very existence, certainly their 
whole future. They had gone into hysterics over the 
French Revolutionary envoys with probably the vaguest 
notion of the details of that tremendous cataclysm, and 
they now imagined that Canada was pining for the blessings 
of democracy. Fifty years later they had so far forgotten 
the military record of New England, till then far superior 
to their own, as to imagine her people had no fight in them. 
They had lived in small worlds of their own with homespun 
notions of those beyond ; a condition no little encouraged 
by the false standards and upon the whole deteriorating 
influence, of negro slavery. This was the element that was 



294 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

mainly, though not entirely, responsible for the cry of ' on 
to Canada' which heralded the war of 1812. It was an 
element too extraordinarily susceptible to wordy and per- 
fervid oratory, partly from defective education and partly 
perhaps from some subtle change in temperament that a 
century or two of warmer suns had wrought upon what was 
then an almost pure British stock. Till the Revolutionary 
war they had been in apathetic fashion the more contented 
of the two sections with the old British connection, but for 
the half-century following it the Southern States, from the 
very narrowness of their outlook, hugged their anti-British 
sentiments and continued to hug them in a curious belated 
and unreasoning fashion, till they began to fall foul of the 
North. After the wreck produced by that great encounter 
there was nothing, as I have already remarked, in their sore 
eyes like a monarchy and the British Constitution. This 
was transient and merely human, if curious to British ears, 
on which it so often fell. On the North, however, with their 
marine and fisheries, their more numerous seacoast towns, 
their more vulnerable possessions, their naval responsibilities, 
the brunt of war would naturally fall. For the war-hawks 
there was only, as they fancied, the promenade to Canada, 
the glories of territorial conquest, and, incidentally, the spoils 
to be found there. As outraged Justice had it, it was the 
land war that failed, and for a time with disgrace, and the 
others who succeeded, upon the sea at any rate, in winning 
no small measure of renown. The only party to the war of 
18 1 2, however, who gained an unalloyed triumph was Canada 
and the little army who assisted in her defence. 

On the declaration of war several of the New England and 
other legislatures and great numbers of town meetings 
passed resolutions denouncing it. Even Maryland, as the 
fateful stroke fell, bethought her of the planters on her 
eastern shore and her seaport capital of Baltimore, and 
passed resolutions commending the attitude of the more 
northerly States, but the mob broke the windows of the 
offices of the Federal press and maltreated every advocate 



APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 295 

of peace. On the 20th of August a day of general fasting 
was appointed for invoking the blessing of the Almighty on 
the crusade, and the struggle was fairly launched. Before 
this an appropriation had been made for 35,000 regulars and 
50,000 volunteers, while 100,000 militia were to be provided 
by the various States. Most of those of New England, 
however, declined to muster their forces. 

The plan of campaign against Canada was designed upon 
three lines, much as in the former wars, with the exception 
that the left wing of attack was now shifted further west and 
directed against the extremity of Canada opposite Detroit. 
This last army was led by Brigadier- General Hull, who had 
served in the Revolutionary war. The central expedition 
against the Niagara frontier consisted of 6000 men under 
Major Van Rensselaer. The eastern one up the old 
Champlain route to Montreal was led by Major-General 
Dearborn, who was Commander-in-Chief except as regards 
Hull's brigade, which was directed by Dr. Eustis, Secretary 
of War, for political purposes of his own it was said. 
He had an eye, it seems, on the Presidency, and a direct 
share in the capture of Upper Canada would be a telling 
asset as well as an easy task, since he had declared that no 
soldiers would be required for its accomplishment. Look at 
it how we may, it was an unjustifiable and unnecessary war, 
desired only by one party in the United States and by 
Napoleon. It failed in its object, as it deserved to fail, and 
the only people who really came out the better for it were 
those who were looked upon as its potential victims, the 
Canadians. 



296 THE MAKING OF CANADA 



CHAPTER XII 

THE WAR IN l8l2 

The British Government, then under Perceval, till the very- 
last failed to realise the full gravity of the situation. 
Neither they nor the nation at large had the least desire 
for a rupture with the United States, but every motive for 
the contrary. The resources of Great Britain in 18 12 were 
strained to breaking-point in a single-handed struggle with 
the conqueror and tyrant of Europe. The Orders in 
Council had been but an answer to the latter's policy, 
and if American commerce suffered from them with that 
of other nations, the Americans had deliberately severed 
themselves from all ties with England, greatly to their 
own satisfaction, and might seem in all equity to be the 
last people to complain of hardships which otherwise they 
would by comparison not have felt, and that were the 
common lot of most nations at the moment. As regards 
British deserters on their ships and the impressment of 
their citizens among British sailors, the Americans had 
started a nation pre-eminently British in race, laws and 
language, and yet more, had invited all and sundry to 
embrace its citizenship without probation. This sort of 
procedure was neither well understood nor well liked in 
those days. Any Englishman, Scotsman, Irishman or 
Nova Scotian in a seaport town could now declare himself 
an American. The Press-gang was not, judged by modern 
ethics, an admirable institution, but it was a recognised one, 
and indiscriminating zeal was the essence of its success. 
That numbers of American citizens, under a code hardly 



THE WAR IN 1812 297 

yet accepted by mankind, were caught in its toils is as 
certain as that the Civis Americanus sum pretext was 
freely attempted by innumerable unfortunates who had not 
even a paper right to it. 1 The United States had in short 
by their mere existence raised a great difficulty to a nation, 
numerically small for its world position. Though without 
design it was nevertheless manning its ships at the expense 
of British seamanship and offered prodigious temptations 
to deserters for whose recapture its local authorities refused 
the facilities generally rendered by other friendly nations 
under like circumstances. Nor was it even the classes 
which had mainly suffered by all these incidental trials 
of the Napoleonic struggle that made the war, but landsmen, 
whose ardent following had for the most part never seen 
the sea, or a ship or a sailor, and whose endeavours to 
punish Great Britain through her commerce by Act of 
Congress had punished chiefly those New England States 
who saw no sense in fighting Great Britain and abominated 
Napoleon and all his works. It was a gratuitous war 
inspired partly by domestic political exigencies, partly by 
a desire for Canada, and according to Henry Clay not 
only for Canada, but for all Great Britain's North American 
colonies — in short ' to drive her from the Continent.' Never- 
theless the British Government had received ample warning 
from its representatives that war was certain, and had 
small excuse for the defenceless condition of Canada at so 
critical a moment. Perceval, who had kept a stiff back 
towards American demands while neglecting the natural 
corollary of Canadian defence, had been assassinated in 
March. A new administration, of virtually the same tenor 
under Lord Liverpool, had met in June and, as stated, had 
revoked the Orders in Council. The King was suffering 
from one of his mental attacks, and the Prince Regent 

1 The proportion of the British navy ' pressed ' in the Napoleonic wars has 
been prodigiously exaggerated even by leading historians. Recent investigations 
have proved that out of the extra 40,000 seamen called for in 1803, 38,000 were 
quickly raised by voluntary enlistment. 



298 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

was in his place. Wellington in the Peninsula was begin- 
ning to make headway, taxation was crushing, provisions 
abnormally dear, and wheat touching those fabulous prices 
which are now among the curiosities of domestic history. 
Trade was paralysed by Napoleon's edicts launched in 
the interest of his lust of conquest, and by England's 
counterstrokes in the interest of self-preservation. Accumu- 
lated stores of goods were rolling up in Great Britain 
under an almost prohibitive marine insurance of nearly 
fifty per cent, and of foodstuffs in the United States under 
her fatuous embargo and non-intercourse acts. There was 
ruin everywhere except to British agriculture and to Canada, 
which became a natural channel for American exports. 
To pour men into Canada would have been impossible, 
but with something like three hundred thousand in regular 
pay, a total of something over four for the defence of 
British North America seems amazingly disproportionate. 
From eight to twelve thousand had been the figures usually 
quoted by commanding officers in Canada as the minimum 
of safety. From the sea no danger was to be apprehended. 
The British navy having destroyed its rivals, had de- 
teriorated somewhat for this very reason, but it was more 
than equal to guarding the mouth of the St. Lawrence 
against any American enterprise. It could have reinforced 
Canada if there had been any troops worth mentioning to 
bring there, and again by destroying American commerce 
it could and did help in time to tire even the American 
war party, and when there were troops available much 
later on, it landed expeditions in the more southerly and 
fire-eating section as well as in Canada, and helped the 
cause of peace to even greater purpose. 

One serious naval oversight, however, had been com- 
mitted in failing to place a sufficient fleet on Lakes Ontario 
and Erie, an omission for which the Home Government was 
entirely to blame. Local effort had done its best, but it 
was without funds for serious shipbuilding, or sailors to 
man such ships when built. Over four hundred miles of the 






THE WAR IN 1812 299 

frontier, though drawn together in the middle for thirty- 
miles at Niagara, were divided and controlled by seas as 
wide as the English Channel. At Detroit as at Niagara, 
and for about the same distance, a river only parted 
American from British territory. Eastward of Kingston 
and Lake Ontario the St. Lawrence was for a time the 
boundary, and afterwards the old border line cut across to 
the head of Lake Champlain and thence for several hundred 
miles zigzagged through the wilderness to the Atlantic. 
But for all practical purposes the frontier which Canada 
had now to defend ran from Lake Champlain to the foot of 
Lake Huron and was six to seven hundred miles in length. 
The brunt of the war, however, was to fall on the Upper 
Province, and by a fortunate chance, for he had automatically 
succeeded to the position, a soldier of lofty character and 
great ability held both the civil and military command 
there. 

Isaac Brock came of a good old Guernsey family and was 
one of eight brothers. He had joined the 8th Regiment 
at fifteen, had seen much active service in Europe, and 
at twenty-eight was Lieutenant-Colonel of the 49th. He 
had spent ten years in that capacity in Canada, either 
in Quebec, Montreal, or the Upper Province, and was now 
a Major-General. It is not merely because he fell in the 
hour of victory upon Canadian soil that he is so frequently 
compared to Wolfe. Being of robust health and physique 
and possessed in consequence of a ruder vitality in the 
ordinary affairs of life, he was doubtless more popular with 
the average man in the street than was the hypercritical 
and exacting hero of Quebec. But he had some of the 
latter's studious habits combined with nearly all his practical 
efficiency. He had gained the affection as well as the 
respect of the Canadians, particularly the British wing — 
no mean achievement for an English officer in those days. 
Thus cut off from active service for many years, Brock 
had found no opportunity to distinguish himself but in 
the discipline of regiments and the planning of the Quebec 



300 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

fortifications, in which he had been of much service to 
Craig. Such letters as his biographers have printed rather 
suggest those of Wolfe, with his warm consideration for his 
relatives and friends and his keen sense of integrity. In 
his qualities he certainly had something of the earlier hero — 
quickness in seizing a point, in dash, in ardour, and 
magnetic power of leadership. A characteristic incident 
is told of his energy. Desertion was naturally frequent 
from the regiments quartered in Canada, and late one 
night when stationed at York news was brought to Brock 
that some of his men had got away in a boat and made 
across the lake for the Niagara shore about thirty miles 
distant. The Colonel, as he then was, without a moment's 
hesitation manned another boat, rowed after them, landed 
on the American side, and eventually captured the whole 
party in the woods. 

The population of the Canadas was now estimated at 
something over 400,000, about a fifth only of which was 
seated in the Upper Province. Early in the year, under the 
conciliatory influence of Prevost, the Lower Canadian 
Legislature had passed a militia bill without opposition 
for enrolling two thousand unmarried men, with a grant of 
nearly the whole year's revenue, which was now £75,000, for 
their support. This had been done, and the stationary 
militia were also in fact mustered and drilled. An active 
regiment of Voltigeurs, too, was raised and placed under 
the command of Major de Salaberry, a seignior who held 
that rank in the 60th Regiment. Lastly, £250,000 was 
raised by means of army bills redeemable in five years. 
The regulars now in Lower Canada were the first battalion 
of the 8th, the 49th, and the 100th Regiment, a few artillery 
and two provincial corps, the Canadian and Glengarry 
fencibles. In Upper Canada were the 41st, nearly a 
thousand strong, two hundred and fifty of the 10th Veteran 
battalion, and the Newfoundland Regiment respectively, 
and fifty artillerymen, in all something under fifteen 
hundred men. The militia, who were mainly composed 



THE WAR IN 1812 301 

of U.E. loyalist stock, responded to a man and declared 
themselves ready to serve in any part of Canada. But it 
was a question rather of the number that could be equipped, 
maintained and transported, for there was no money in 
the chest. A group of private individuals, however, came 
to Brock's aid and guaranteed sufficient for the moment. 
Nearly a thousand militia and a volunteer transport corps 
of farmers' sons made up Brock's total effective force to 
two thousand five hundred. Hull was first among the 
invaders to take aggressive action. An elderly man who 
had fought in the Revolutionary war, he was now Governor 
of Michigan, and in that capacity, according to the rites of 
the democratic creed, till things got serious became a 
Brigadier-General and had chief command over Miller, a 
colonel of regulars, who supported with his corps the 
undisciplined horde of Ohio militia. It is only just to say 
that Hull had advised Eustis, whose detached expedi- 
tion it may be remembered this one was, against crossing 
into Canada from Detroit till he had some shipping to 
cope with the British vessels on the lake. But the would- 
be President was in too great a hurry to take Canada on 
his own account and brushed aside such trifling objections. 
As Governor of Michigan, however, Hull played his part 
adequately. Starting a week or two before war was declared, 
he carried his two thousand five hundred men to the ancient 
French settlement town of Detroit, where the western end 
of the fertile peninsula of Canada lay within cannon shot 
across the river of that name. On the further shore was 
the village of Sandwich, upon whose primitive houses his 
gunners tried their hands. This was not at all in the spirit 
of amity now breathed over western Canada by the invad- 
ing Governor's proclamation from Sandwich, which he 
occupied on July 12th. It is too long for transcription, 
but here is part of it : — 

' After thirty years of peace and prosperity the United 
States have been driven to arms ; the injuries and aggressions, 
the insults and indignities of Great Britain have once more 



302 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

left them no alternative but manly resistance or uncon- 
ditional submission. The army under my command has 
invaded your country, and the Standard of the Union now 
waves over the territory of Canada. To the peaceable 
unoffending inhabitant it brings neither danger nor diffi- 
culty. I come to find enemies not to make them, I come to 
protect not to injure you.' Separated by the ocean and the 
wilderness, Hull told the Canadians they could have no 
interest in Great Britain, while they had felt her tyranny 
and seen her injustice. He then offered them the invalu- 
able blessings of civil, political and religious liberty. He 
adjured them to remain at home and pursue their avoca- 
tions, and as children of the same family not to raise their 
hands against their brethren, for the army of friends he 
brought with him must be hailed by them with a cordial 
welcome. They would be emancipated from tyranny and 
oppression and restored to the dignity of freemen. ' Had I 
any doubt of eventual success I might ask your assistance, 
but I have none. I have a force which will look down all 
opposition, and that force but the vanguard of a much greater 
one. If, contrary to your own interests, you should take part 
in the approaching contest you will be considered and 
treated as enemies, the horrors and calamities of war will 
stalk before you.' 

After denouncing the barbarous policy of Great Britain 
in letting loose the savages to murder American women and 
children, he threatened that the first stroke of the toma- 
hawk would be the sign for a war without quarter and 
of extermination, a statement hardly fair on the Upper 
Canadians who had been originally hounded out of their 
ancient abodes and were now peaceably settled under the 
British flag. This astonishing peroration — seeing that 
in the main it was addressed to U.E. loyalists — concludes : 
1 The United States offers you peace, liberty and security ; 
your choice lies between these and war, slavery and destruc- 
tion. Choose then and choose wisely.' 

This precious document could scarcely have reached any 






THE WAR IN 1812 303 

Canadians to speak of before Hull's colonels began with 
singular inconsistency to raid the country up the river 
Thames, which, though but thinly settled, furnished con- 
siderable loot in breadstuffs and other spoils. But before 
reaching Detroit, Hull's misfortunes had begun and his 
forebodings as to danger from the lake justified. He had 
loaded a schooner at the mouth of the Maumee with his 
stores and other necessaries for the campaign, while there 
went with it as passengers many of his officers' wives 
anxious to participate in the Canadian promenade. The 
schooner was in due course overhauled by an armed British 
ship and captured. The loss of its cargo seemed serious at the 
time, though as events turned out of not much moment, and 
the ladies were, no doubt, eventually thankful to have been 
thus balked of their trip. The British force on the Detroit 
river was as yet trifling, a hundred men of the 41st, thrice 
as many militia, all under Colonel St. George, and a hundred 
and fifty Indians under Tecumseh, the great Shawnee 
chief — a second Brant, but on the whole a finer one. A 
good deal of forest skirmishing took place ; enough, at any 
rate, to show the inefficiency or even worse of the Ohio and 
Michigan militia. In the meantime a company of Ohio 
volunteers with Hull's beef cattle and other supplies were 
waiting at Brownstown on the mouth of the Maumee to 
come through to Detroit, but the parties sent to convoy them 
were ambushed and routed by Indians. The outlook was 
now rapidly changing. Instead of advancing into Canada, 
Hull discovered that Sandwich was no longer tenable and 
recrossed to Detroit, leaving only a small post behind him. 
He had been in Canada altogether about a fortnight, 
had done a good deal of pillaging, and killed apparently 
one Indian, whose scalp, so the Ohio captain who killed 
him informed his wife in a letter, he had torn from the skull 
with his teeth. Brock, who was still busy at York and 
Niagara both in his civil and military capacity laying his 
plans for defence and providing ways and means therefor, 
had sent Colonel Procter and another sixty men of the 41st 



304 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

west as soon as he got news of the invasion. Hull was now 
seriously concerned for his supplies, and wholly disillusioned 
as to his militiamen. Another attempt in force was made 
to get the convoys through. Colonel Miller with six hun- 
dred men, mainly regulars, some cavalry and two guns, 
marched southward down the right bank of the Detroit 
river, and bearing more than one recent stampede in mind, 
the Colonel gave orders that every man who left his post 
should be instantly shot. Fourteen miles south of Detroit 
they met Captain Muir of the 41st with seventy-five men of 
his regiment, sixty militia, and two hundred Indians, mainly 
under Tecumseh, thrown across their path at a spot known 
as Mayauga, which gave its name to the only real stand-up 
fight of this campaign. On the American attack a minority 
of the Indians unconnected with Tecumseh fled. The rest 
of the force retiring to a better position after some smart 
fighting, Miller flinched from attacking it, and on the next 
day Colonel M'Arthur came down with a hundred more 
Ohio men in boats for the use of the wounded, which num- 
bered nearly sixty. But no further attack was made on 
the British, and the disheartened force marched back to 
Detroit, while the boats and wounded were captured by 
Lieutenant Rolette, who had already distinguished himself 
by the seizure of Hull's supply ship. Eighteen Americans 
had been killed, while the British loss was three killed and 
twelve wounded. This may seem a chronicle of small 
things, but it caused the evacuation of Canada and Hull's 
complete withdrawal of his troops to short commons and 
mutual recriminations within the fort above Detroit. 
Brock himself now hastened to the scene with two hun- 
dred and forty militia and forty regulars, travelling in boats 
up Lake Erie to Amherstburg and thence to the scene of 
action. As soon as Hull's detachment evacuated Sand- 
wich it was occupied by the British, intrenched, and five 
guns mounted within range of Detroit. On Brock's arrival 
there he sent a flag of truce to Hull with a demand for 
his surrender, which was met by a defiant refusal. The 



THE WAR IN 1812 305 

little battery now opened on the fort with considerable 
effect, and the fort replied with none whatever. In the 
night Tecumseh, with one or two British officers and six 
hundred Indians, crossed the river and took ambush till 
morning, while at daylight Brock himself made the passage 
with three hundred and thirty regulars and four hundred 
militia, supported by a sharp and extremely effective 
cannonade from the Sandwich battery, which killed among 
others several officers. Brock now advanced with his whole 
force against the fort, which contained a good many non- 
combatants and women and the whole of Hull's force save 
a detachment of three hundred and fifty men, who were 
endeavouring to reach by a circuitous route the still isolated 
convoys. But in the very act of delivering his attack, a 
white flag was displayed and an aide-de-camp came out 
from Hull proposing negotiations for surrender. These 
were arranged and signed in an hour. Hull and his two 
thousand five hundred men, including Colonel M'Arthur and 
his absent detachment, capitulated and became prisoners 
of war, while thirty odd cannon and a considerable supply 
of arms and stores, with an armed brig, proved a welcome 
acquisition to the Canadians. The date of this achieve- 
ment, so memorable in Canadian annals, was August 16th. 
The Indians under Tecumseh had not merely behaved well 
in battle, but had also belied their reputation and the 
fearsome anticipations indulged in by Hull and others of 
their ferocity, by behaving well to their captives. Brock 
sent the Ohio and Michigan militia to their homes, under a 
stipulation not to serve again during the war, while Hull and 
his regulars, infantry, cavalry and artillery were despatched 
as prisoners to Quebec. Eighteen months later, under a 
court-martial presided over by General Dearborn, a personal 
enemy, Hull was found guilty of cowardice and sentenced 
to be shot. Madison endorsed the verdict, but repealed the 
sentence. The horse upon whose back Madison's war 
minister had hoped to ride into the presidential chair had 
indeed broken down. It must be said, however, for Hull, 

U 



306 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

that he had expressed doubts of the strategy imposed upon 
him, and had not himself written that historic and pre- 
posterous proclamation. But he was old and faltering, with 
few qualifications for leadership, certainly for leadership of a 
force two-thirds of which was an undisciplined mob. Still 
the fact of two thousand five hundred well-armed men 
in a fortress capitulating unconditionally to seven hundred 
and fifty regulars and militia, with six hundred Indians, 
could not be minimised by any amount of explanation, and 
above all coming as an abrupt climax to such triumphant 
screeds as had sounded from the war -hawks all over 
America. The effect was disproportionate to the scale in 
the humiliation on the one side and encouragement on 
the other. Hardly less important was its effect on that 
large portion, possibly a majority of the English-speaking 
inhabitants scattered throughout Canada, whose loyalty was 
doubtful or lukewarm. Brock had encountered symptoms 
of this even in the House of Assembly when the necessary 
bills were hurried through before his departure for Detroit. 

Even before this another and smaller success had fallen 
to the British arms. For at the first note of war the little 
garrison of Fort St. Joseph, the lonely post on the far-away 
Straits between Lakes Huron and Superior, had surprised 
the still weaker force holding the old fort of Michillimackinac 
forty miles away. The chief import of this coup was the 
impression it made on the Indians. Brock, who had replied 
to Hull's vapouring manifesto in a stirring address to the 
Canadians, now issued one to the inhabitants of Michigan 
under the assumption that he had conquered and held their 
territory. Colonel Procter was left with a small garrison at 
Detroit, and the General himself hastened back to the 
Niagara frontier, where the chief danger now lay. Before 
recounting what took place there, however, one or two 
incidents concerned with the proclamation of war must 
be told. 

Now the American Government, particularly as regards 
Hull's expedition, had counted on its following up the 



THE WAR IN 1812 307 

declaration before the Canadians were aware that it had 
been made, for official intimations from British sources were 
slow and circuitous. Curiously enough, it was an American 
who, by a special courier to his agent at Niagara, put Brock 
on his guard, and no less a person than John Jacob Astor, 
the founder of that famous family, who was interested in the 
Canadian fur trade. Furthermore the revocation of the Orders 
in Council by the British Government concurrently with the 
American declaration of war, caused the former, and most 
naturally so, seeing that the said orders were the chief cause 
of it, to reopen negotiations with the Washington Govern- 
ment and to instruct Prevost and the Admiral on the North 
American coast to suspend operations till the result of their 
overtures should be known. Prevost immediately sent his 
adjutant-general, Baynes, to Dearborn at his Albany camp, 
and concluded an armistice commencing on August 6th. 
He requested that Hull's command at Detroit should be 
included in it, but in this Dearborn was powerless, as the 
other was not under his authority. Had he been so, he and 
his country would probably have been saved the disgrace 
into which Eustis's selfish haste and folly and his own incom- 
petence involved them. But the temperature of Madison's 
Government had passed the line that divides reason from 
delirium and would listen to no talk of peace and put a 
prompt end to the armistice, which closed on August 29th. 
England's well-meant efforts had been unfortunate for her 
arms in Canada. The truce enabled the Americans to 
bring up belated troops and supplies to the front and to 
use the water carriage of Lake Ontario, which was at present 
controlled by British ships. Above all, it enabled a flotilla 
of American merchant ships blockaded at Ogdensburg to 
sail for Sacketts harbour, where they were converted into 
ships of war. The command of the lakes was recognised 
as of vital consequence to Canada, and here an ill fate had 
more than half thrown it away. 

The Niagara river front of thirty odd miles, all of it 
navigable save the eight or nine of rapid above and below 



308 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

the Falls, was now the point of strife and interest; for 
Dearborn, on the Champlain route, with all his honours 
and his ample force, gave little trouble this year as we shall 
see. Van Rensselaer was the American commander at this 
important point. He was not in the army, but represented 
one of the most important old patroon and territorial families 
of New York State, a sensible and worthy gentleman of some 
political influence who had opposed the war, and by this 
mark of confidence it was hoped both to conciliate him and 
his following. We are not concerned with the mysterious 
reasonings of these early Democratic makers of war in the 
United States, who were sometimes saved in the end, though 
at considerable cost, by the ignored professionals, forced by 
emergencies to the top. Hull had two or three such officers 
under him who arraigned him for their misfortunes in 
savage terms. The humour of the situation in Van 
Rensselaer's case was either mitigated or increased, as we 
may choose to regard it, by the company of his cousin 
Solomon of the same name, who as a colonel of regulars 
was placed at his elbow. Yet one must in equity remember 
that the American regular of 1812 had a limited experience 
and no more traditions than a militiaman. 

By way too of making the path more difficult for Van 
Rensselaer, Brigadier-General Smythe of the regular army 
was placed under his command, and very naturally took 
the keenest pleasure in thwarting him. The ' army of the 
centre,' as this one was designated, consisted of over 6000 
men, of whom 3600 were regulars. They were stationed in 
the various posts along the river of which Fort Niagara, 
Lewiston, the General's headquarters, and Buffalo, then but 
an embryo town, were the chief. At the latter place, which 
with a neighbouring post, Black Rock, stood at the eastern 
entrance to Lake Erie, was Smythe. The regulars were 
chiefly gathered at both extremities, the militia immediately 
under Van Rensselaer at Lewiston, but within eight miles 
and easy call of the regulars at Fort Niagara and Four 
Mile Creek at the Ontario mouth of the river, whence a 



THE WAR IN 1812 309 

straight road had been cut. S my the was therefore nearly 
thirty miles away from his chief and somewhat out of 
touch, a fact he made the most of. The militia had all the 
preliminary ardour of inexperience, and the Washington 
Government looked on success as an absolute certainty. 
They had an early note of encouragement too in the 
achievement of Lieutenant Elliot, of the U.S. navy, a service 
that shared in none of the disadvantages which belonged 
to the land forces of that day. For two small British war 
vessels, the captured Detroit and another containing forty 
American prisoners, both lying off Fort Erie opposite 
Buffalo, were surprised by this young officer and captured. 

Brock all this time was making such disposal of his 
meagre forces as he was able. He had for the moment only 
twelve hundred men in all, regulars and militia. Ludicrous 
as such a muster sounds when opposed by the main attack of 
a contiguous nation numbering nearly eight millions, it is 
a fact, and one of the most remarkable probably in military 
history. When one has said that the regulars, mainly of 
the 41st and 49th, were first-class troops, though they 
constantly got drunk and were occasionally mutinous — a 
paradox familiar to any one with any book knowledge of 
the British army that fought Napoleon — and furthermore, 
that the militia were ready to die to a man for the stake 
they were fighting for, it scarcely seems to lessen the 
significance of such preposterous odds. One may go on 
to say that they were commanded by a soldier of talent 
and spirit whom they adored, and furthermore that no 
spark of the friction which a blend of regulars and irregulars 
almost always ignites was here present ; yet even with all 
this the prospects of Upper Canada might well have seemed 
desperate. Brock's second in command was Major-General 
Sheaffe of American birth, but Colonel of the 49th, and we 
may note by the way how many old colonial Americans of 
that generation became officers in the British army. Of the 
U.E. loyalists, young Beverly Robinson of the always distin- 
guished Canadian family of that name, and afterwards Chief- 



3io THE MAKING OF CANADA 

Justice of the province, had been with Brock at Detroit and 
was still with him. Merritt, an old Queen's Ranger of the 
Revolution, whose lineal representative led Canadians in the 
Boer War, was here in command of the Niagara dragoons 
as well as his son. Colonel M'Donnell, another notable 
U.E. of Glengarry and Attorney-General of the province, 
led the York militia, to die at its head. Powell, son of the 
Chief- Justice, had a local battery of artillery. Dickson, the 
founder of Gait, whose house at Newark was within the 
firing zone, was a militia captain, besides many others whose 
sons and grandsons have worthily maintained their tradi- 
tions through the succeeding century of Anglo-Canadian 
history. 

It was not till the 13th of October that Van Rensselaer 
delivered the attack which no one in the United States, 
whether of the bellicose or the dissentient party, doubted 
for a moment would make Upper Canada at any rate 
another star in the American constellation. The intention 
was to form a large camp at Queenstown as a base of 
operations against the rest of the province and Montreal, 
though Smythe at Buffalo was all for crossing at that point 
and would have nothing to say to the other plan. Fort 
Niagara was to bombard Fort George, while the regulars 
from its camp assisted Van Rensselaer's militia, whom the 
success of Elliot had so fired with martial ardour as to 
protest that unless they were immediately led into Canada 
they would go home. The idea seems to have been rooted 
among them that the Canadian people were friendly to 
the invasion, that serious resistance was impossible, while 
with many the prospect of plunder was a strong incentive, 
as the experience of Hull's invasion had demonstrated. A 
day or two later the same men obstinately refused to move 
on the plea that they had only enlisted to serve on their 
own soil. 

This fiery impatience somewhat unduly hurried Van 
Rensselaer's plans, and the first attempt was a fiasco. An 
hour or so before daybreak on the nth of October the 



THE WAR IN 1812 311 

invading force was gathered with sufficient boats imme- 
diately opposite Queenston heights, a then thickly wooded 
ridge some 350 feet high, which at this point breaks the 
comparatively level shores of the Niagara river, just here 
about 200 yards broad, and of swift though navigable current. 
One Lieutenant Sim, who from his skill in such matters 
had command of the leading boat, either by design or 
accident carried off in it nearly all the oars of the flotilla, 
landed on the other side, and disappeared to be no more 
seen or heard of. The troops on shore, exposed in the 
meantime to a prolonged storm, marched back again to 
camp, soaked to the skin and sore with disappointment. 
On the next night preparations were renewed for another 
attempt. The British general had been convinced that the 
attack would be delivered either near Fort George or above 
the Falls. But Major Evans of his regulars, who had 
crossed the river on a mission to Van Rensselaer a day or 
two before, caught a glimpse of boats obviously concealed, 
and thus Brock was warned. Three hundred of the 49th 
and York militia were stationed at Queenston, the river- 
side village just north of and beneath the lateral ridge 
which fell with a steep wooded pitch into the water. Half- 
way up the heights on their north side a single gun 
battery was posted, the rest of Brock's meagre force being 
disposed at points along the seven miles between Queenston 
and his own quarters at Fort George near the mouth of 
the river. 

In the dark of the morning of the 13th, about an hour 
before day, three hundred regulars and as many militia, 
under Van Rensselaer's cousin and Colonel Christie, com- 
menced the passage by relays to Queenston as a first 
instalment. They were discovered by three small British 
batteries which commanded the spot ; one already men- 
tioned as high up the hill side, another at Queenston 
village, and a third at Vrooman's point just below. Con- 
siderable execution was done and several men were killed 
in the boats ; some of the latter being washed lower down 



312 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

by the swift current, while others were driven on to the 
British shore and their freight captured. Lieutenant 
Robinson, before mentioned as being with Brock at Detroit, 
and afterwards Sir John Beverly Robinson, has left a 
notable MS. account of his experiences: — 'Grape and 
musket shot,' he writes, ' poured upon the Americans as they 
approached the shore, a single discharge from a brass six- 
pounder destroying fifteen in a boat. Three of the bateaux 
landed below Mr. Hamilton's garden in Queenston, and 
were met by a party of militia and regulars who slaughtered 
almost the whole of them, taking the rest prisoners. Several 
other boats were so shattered and disabled that the men in 
them threw down their arms and came on shore, merely 
to deliver themselves up as prisoners of war. As we 
advanced with our company we met troops of Americans 
on their way to Fort George under guard, and the road was 
lined with miserable wretches suffering under wounds of 
all descriptions and crawling to our houses for protection 
and comfort. The spectacle struck us who were not inured 
to such scenes with horror, but we hurried to the mountain, 
impressed with the idea that the enemy's attempt was 
already frustrated and the business of the day nearly com- 
pleted.' Some two hundred regulars with Van Rensselaer 
landed, however, and formed on the shore under the high 
bank of the river. While awaiting their comrades they 
were attacked by a small British detachment under Hatt, 
aided by the fire of some of the 49th and Chisholm's com- 
pany of militia, who had taken post near the brow of the 
height with a gun. More boat-loads of American regulars 
now joined their comrades, and at this moment Brock 
arrived at a gallop from Fort George with his aides 
M'Donnell and Clegg, having roused the posts on the way. 
It was now daybreak, and Brock pushing forward to the 
small battery on the higher slope ordered down the com- 
pany stationed there, save a few men at the gun, to the 
support of their friends on the river bank by the village. 
General Van Rensselaer seeing the hilltop almost clear of 



THE WAR IN 1812 313 

troops, determined to seize it. Some of his officers long 
stationed at Fort Niagara were familiar with the ridge and 
a steep path up it, which had not escaped Brock though 
reported to him as inaccessible. Captain Wool, afterwards 
a well-known General, was entrusted with the task, which 
he possibly initiated, and a detachment of from three to 
four hundred men for its achievement. This was so suc- 
cessfully performed that Brock and his party were almost 
surprised at the battery now captured by the Americans. 
Reaching the bottom of the slope, however, the General 
collected about a hundred men, whom he at once led 
against the hill, and recovered the battery, though unfortu- 
nately himself to be soon afterwards hit in the breast by 
a ball and almost instantly killed. Upon this his little party 
fell back down the hill again, when M'Donnell, coming 
up with his two companies of militia, which brought the 
force up to two hundred, took the stricken general's place, 
and again reached and carried the battery, though at 
the cost of both leaders, Captain Williams wounded and 
himself killed. The men, outnumbered and now without 
leaders, were once more driven down the hill, whereupon 
Captain Dennis taking command of the whole, fell back to a 
battery at Vrooman's point behind the village to await rein- 
forcements. There was now a long lull. The Americans 
established themselves at their leisure on the heights, to 
the number, as subsequent events proved, of about twelve 
hundred, mainly regulars. Van Rensselaer came over him- 
self, his cousin the Colonel being badly wounded, and 
indeed several boat-loads of killed and wounded men had 
already been sent back to Lewiston. A British artillery 
officer, Holcroft, had planted a gun in the village at some 
risk and succeeded in sinking more than one of the 
American boats laden with fresh soldiers. But the pro- 
spects for the British now looked sufficiently gloomy. The 
death of Brock had filled every man in the little army with 
profound grief. An eye-witness tells us how a dragoon on 
a bespattered foaming horse, without either helmet or 



314 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

t 

sword, brought the news to Fort Erie, where, according to 
orders, a fierce cannonade was being maintained against the 
answering batteries on the American shore. ' Brock was 
dead and the enemy in possession of Queenston heights ! ' 
Some wept, some swore ; all worked the heavy guns with 
demoniacal energy, as if they were field pieces, while 
triumphant cheers rang out along the American shore as 
the news which arrived there at the same time travelled 
from post to post. At the Niagara end of the line too the 
disaster only stimulated the gunners at Fort George to 
such energy as to silence the opposing American batteries, 
which had been pouring red-hot shot with destructive 
effect on the shingle roofs of the former capital of Upper 
Canada. Towards three o'clock, however, General SheafTe, 
now in command, arrived from Fort George, having left a 
detachment there under Major Evans to keep Fort Niagara 
in check. He brought with him every other available man, 
three hundred and eighty of the 41st, and three hundred 
militia, with a hundred and fifty Indians under a well-known 
chief, Norton, by repute a Scotsman, who had been already 
skirmishing around the heights, while two hundred more 
militia were coming up from the post at Chippewa over 
against the Falls. Van Rensselaer in the meantime from 
his lofty perch on Queenston heights had descried the 
advance of SheafTe, and noticing with anxious impa- 
tience that the militia at Lewiston, under orders to join 
him, were painfully slow about it, he recrossed the river 
himself to quicken their movements. To his disgust he 
found that every spark of the martial frenzy which had 
forced him, as a matter of fact, to rather overhurried measures 
had absolutely vanished. Whether it was the thunder of 
the guns or the returning boats with their cargoes of dead 
and mangled men, these fire-eaters had at any rate dis- 
covered that their terms of enlistment did not provide for 
their service outside the borders of their own State, and they 
were fully resolved to stand by the Constitution. Raw 
militia in all countries at various times have flinched un- 



THE WAR IN 1812 315 

blushingly as they have also, like the U.E. loyalists 
across the river, performed heroic deeds. But never perhaps, 
unless at Detroit, have they prefaced timorous conduct with 
such vociferous bombast as did these hapless warriors of 
New York on this particular occasion. So the General, 
having vainly awaited help from his jealous subordinate 
at Buffalo, was, fortunately for himself as it turned out, 
obliged to leave Brigadier Wadsworth in command on the 
heights, where he had a force at least slightly superior to 
anything his enemy could bring against him, and more than 
half of them regulars. Sheaffe in the meantime, doubting 
the wisdom of a frontal attack up the open north slope, and 
leaving some of the original Queenston force to command 
the river and hold the village, moved round the hill with 
the rest of his men and his Indians, and in conjunction with 
the small Chippewa detachment attacked the heights from 
the landward or western side. The Americans, somewhat 
crowded on the ridge and with their backs to a precipice 
above the river, relieved only by the tangled path up which 
they had come, received his onslaught at some disadvantage. 
It was now afternoon and they had been on the move for 
twelve hours, while most of Sheaffe's men were compara- 
tively fresh, and all, moreover, either highly disciplined 
or burning with ardour and exasperated by the death of 
Brock ; and they were admirably led. A single volley, a 
rousing cheer, an Indian war-whoop and a charge with the 
bayonet practically finished the business in spite of the 
equality in numbers, though there was some partial resist- 
ance. Many of the fugitives flung themselves over the 
precipice ; those that could escaped down the narrow 
path, while others leaped into the river and were drowned. 
Brigadier-General Wadsworth, who was in command, sent 
an offer to surrender his whole force by Colonel Winfield 
Scott, the future hero of the Mexican war, and the object of 
invocation to this day in a familiar American slang phrase. 
Something under a thousand surrendered, ninety were 
slain, numbers drowned, and many escaped. Brock and 



316 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

M'Donnell were the only officers killed on the British side, 
while seventy of the rank and file and about a dozen 
Indians were killed or wounded. 

Such was the battle of Queenston heights, next to the 
Plains of Abraham the most cherished place of bygone 
strife in Canada, though there are many far more deeply 
dyed in blood and distinguished for much fiercer struggles 
between much larger armies. Brock was buried in a 
bastion of Fort George, and the rage of a conflict to which 
his death made such an incalculable difference swept back 
and forth over his grave. He was virtually irreplaceable, 
for not only was he a fine soldier and born leader, but he 
had turned his long service in Canada to good account and 
won the affectionate admiration of the U.E. loyalists. 
His influence and his memory nerved many an arm in the 
coming struggle, but as a commander he had in no sense 
any successor in it. Some years after the peace Brock's 
remains were removed to Queenston heights and a monu- 
ment raised above them, which was blown up in 1846 by 
some unknown and undiscovered miscreant. Immediately 
after this disaster a great gathering, including nearly all 
able to attend it who had served under him, was held on 
the heights, and ten thousand pounds raised out of which 
the much statelier and now familiar column was erected. 

The mortification of the American people at this disaster 
was intense. It could not be laid upon the shoulders of a 
General, nor was it. No wealth of invective was spared the 
militia who stood and looked on while the more resolute 
portion of their comrades-in-arms were slaughtered or 
captured. Van Rensselaer soon resigned, and for the re- 
mainder of that season Smythe took command of the 
' army of the centre,' and proceeded to the invasion of 
Canada upon the quarter above the Falls that he had 
stoutly maintained to be the proper one for the purpose. 
Sheaffe had unfortunately agreed to an armistice which 
gave his opponents time to bring up forces and supplies, 
while he had himself neither the one nor the other to bring 



THE WAR IN 1812 317 

up. Presumably too it gave opportunity to Smythe for the 
composition of that Napoleonic address, which was to come 
down to posterity with the former one of Hull's among the 
flowers of martial perorations. It was addressed to the 
' men of New York,' who it must be admitted needed a 
stimulant, and Smythe after all knew their taste better than 
we do. But there was no excuse for official abuse of Van 
Rensselaer as an incompetent amateur, since he acted in 
perfect accord with military advisers, whose plans and 
resolution in prosecuting them, together with that of the 
men who actually followed them, left little to be desired. 
The final debacle on the hilltop before the rush of the 
British was no disgrace. The discipline of the British 
regular, the elan of the British amateur defending his 
country was greater than that of the similar elements 
opposed to him — that was all. 

1 Hull and Van Rensselaer,' said Smythe to the men of 
New York, ' were popular persons, destitute alike of theory 
and experience in the art of war. In a few days the troops 
under my command will plant the American standard in 
Canada. They will conquer or die ! Will you stand with 
your arms folded and look on at this interesting struggle ? 
The present is for renown : have you not a wish for fame ? 
Then seize the present moment ; if you do not you will 
regret it, and say the friends of my country fell, and I was 
not there.' 

A few days later Smythe gave them a second dose, com- 
mencing, ' Companions in arms ! The time is at hand when 
you will cross the stream at Niagara to conquer Canada and 
enter a country that is to be one of the United States. 
You are superior in number to the enemy ; your personal 
strength and activity are greater ; your weapons are longer ; 
the regular soldiers of the enemy are generally old men 
whose best years have been spent in the sick climate of the 
West Indies. They will not be able to stand before you ; 
you who charge with bayonet, Come on, my heroes ! ' 

If the New York and Pennsylvania farmers' sons who 



318 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

mustered about Buffalo, and had rarely even an elementary- 
knowledge of the use of the bayonet, believed these flights 
of fancy, which from the sequel appears unlikely, they must 
have been surprised when they met the ' Green Tigers/ as 
the 49th were then called in North America. 

Smythe during this month of November, independently 
of Van Rensselaer's old command below the Falls, which 
still watched that country, had an army of about 4500 men, 
1 500 of whom were regulars ; the rest were New York and 
Pennsylvania militia, with a company from Baltimore. 
Opposed to Smythe and extended over the sixteen miles 
between Chippewa, above the rapids which precede the 
Falls and Fort Erie, near the lake entrance, over against 
Black Rock and Buffalo, the American headquarters, were 
just a thousand men. These consisted of detachments of 
the 41st and 49th (British Regiments), the Lincoln 
county (Niagara district) and Norfolk militia, under the 
command of Lieutenant-Colonel Bisshop. Their disposi- 
tion, with the local topography responsible for it, cannot be 
described here. It will be enough that on November 28th 
and at three in the morning, Smythe launched his great 
attack on Canada. It was well conceived, but entirely 
frustrated. There was a night of confused and tolerably 
severe fighting between the vanguard of his army, or such 
parts of it as succeeded in landing, and about a third of the 
British force, all of whom, however, did their part either in 
guarding the shore, serving guns, or in responding to those 
many emergencies which the hour and the darkness occa- 
sioned. As at Queenston, several of the American boats 
were sunk by artillery fire. Though the whole of Smythe's 
army was under arms on the shore the attempt was finally 
abandoned. The British had lost about eighty officers and 
men, the Americans from the nature of their service more 
than twice as many. 

During the day Smythe held a council of war, at which 
there was considerable disagreement. But on the 29th he 
resolved upon another attack, and boomed forth another 



THE WAR IN 1812 319 

caricature of Napoleonic thunder : * The General will be on 
hand ; neither rain, snow, nor frost will prevent the embar- 
kation. The cavalry will scour the fields from Black Rock 
to the bridge and suffer no idle spectators (this in reference 
to Van Rensselaer's militia at Lewiston). While embarking 
the music will play martial airs. Yankee Doodle will be the 
signal to get under weigh. The landing will be effected in 
spite of cannon, for the whole army has seen that cannon 
are little to be dreaded.' And finally : ' Hearts of war ! 
To-morrow will be a day memorable in the annals of the 
United States.' Lack of harmony in council, however, 
delayed the proceedings a couple of days till December 1st. 
Fifteen hundred men were at length successfully embarked 
when the Pennsylvania militia, entirely sceptical as to their 
General's views on the inefficiency of cannon, stood upon 
their constitutional rights and refused to leave American 
soil. Their example spread, and another council of war 
was held. The invasion was ultimately abandoned and the 
militia sent home, while the regulars went into winter 
quarters, and General Smythe was given indefinite leave of 
absence. 

The surrender of Hull at Detroit had by no means ter- 
minated the season's fighting in the far west. Exasperation 
at that disgrace ran high in the south, particularly in Ohio 
and Kentucky. The latter State put no less than five 
thousand men under arms, and Generals Winchester and 
Harrison, the ' hero of Tippecanoe,' had actually under 
their command threatening Detroit at least seven thousand, 
including two or three regiments of regulars, in addition to 
cavalry and artillery. Prevost, who had a weakness for 
truces, had insisted on Procter, after Hull's defeat, observing 
the one which was then in force to the eastward, though 
his field of operations had been specially exempted from 
it by Dearborn, the American commander-in-chief. This 
gave the enemy every opportunity to bring up their forces 
from the south, prevented Procter from checking them, 
which had been Brock's last orders, and drove numbers of 



320 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

Indians in disgust from his standard. The Americans, 
however, took pains to secure and justify that hostility of 
the savages, which they not unnaturally execrated, by burn- 
ing their villages and winter supplies. They never took 
them prisoners in the field, and generally scalped them, 
which made it almost impossible for British officers, or even 
their own chiefs like Tecumseh, to restrain the natural 
impulse of the savage when out of sight, though on many 
occasions their conduct after a victory was blameless. It 
should also be remembered, firstly, that the Americans had 
broken faith with the Indians south of the lakes ; secondly, 
that they had destroyed all their property and means of 
livelihood ; thirdly, that their war was one of aggression 
all round, clamoured for by themselves, and which, if suc- 
cessful, would have resulted in the certain destruction of the 
Canadian Indians ; fourthly, that they would have them- 
selves utilised the services of the savages without a doubt 
had they been on sufficiently good terms with them at 
the time and the situation reversed, as indeed they actually 
did later on. 

Winter, however, was not to stop the ardour of the 
avengers of Detroit The little village of Frenchtown on 
the Raisin river, which flows into the western extremity of 
Lake Erie, was Procter's most southerly outpost. Here he 
had thirty Canadian militia and two hundred Indians under 
Major Reynolds to watch the enemy. Against these there 
now came on from the Maumee rapids, where the Americans 
were concentrating six hundred and fifty regulars and Ken- 
tuckians under those well-known frontier officers, Lewis and 
Allen. After a smart defence with their single gun, the 
little British party, with the trifling loss of one man and 
three Indians to themselves, and of sixty-seven killed and 
wounded to the enemy, retired to Brownstown, at the mouth 
of the Detroit river. Winchester in the meantime moved 
up to Frenchtown with reinforcements, while Procter, with- 
out loss of a day, on hearing the news started from Amherst- 
burg, on the Canadian side of the lake and river, with all 



THE WAR IN 1812 321 

his available force, about five hundred regulars and militia 
and as many Indians. They marched across the four miles 
of frozen snow-covered water in a compact force, a small, 
resolute, and martial company. The rumble of guns upon 
the icy track, the war-cries of the Indians, the glint of the 
bright wintry sun upon the burnished arms, says Major 
Richardson, who was there, left a lasting picture upon his 
mind. 

Winchester had a thousand men at Frenchtown, and with 
almost precisely that number, upon January 22nd, in the 
dark of a bitter morning, too cold even for the usual scouts 
to be abroad, Procter fell upon him with scant notice. Part 
of Winchester's force was in the open, others under cover of 
houses and buildings, while a small redoubt sheltered a 
number of riflemen and made their fire especially formidable. 
After an hour's fighting the American right was turned and 
crumpled up by the Indians and militia, and the whole force, 
with the exception of four hundred, who threw themselves 
into a blockhouse, forced back and pursued with great 
slaughter. General Winchester himself was captured, and 
having no troops left but those in the blockhouse, he sent 
an order for their surrender. Five hundred prisoners, 
including these last, were delivered to Procter, and about 
four hundred Americans lay dead on the snowbound field 
and in the trail of the pursuit, for the Indians, exasperated 
by the destruction of their villages, made no prisoners. 
Something over a hundred stragglers survived to reach Fort 
Meigs and the main army, to tell the tale to General Har- 
rison. Of the British part of Procter's force rather over a 
third were killed or wounded, so he could neither follow up 
his victory, nor even remain where he was, for the whole of 
Harrison's army would shortly be upon him. He had more 
prisoners than white troops to guard them, but ultimately 
succeeded in taking them all back save the severely wounded, 
who were left in charge of a detachment. There were 
Indians, however, prowling about in search of scalps, who 
here and there were only too successful. Among those 

x 



322 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

lifted, by some irony of fate, was that of a brother-in-law 
of Henry Clay, chief of the non-combatant war-hawks. His 
scalp, though in this case its loss was due to its owner's 
indiscretion, was worth much more to the war press than 
those of a whole company without political affinities. 
Procter for this affair at Frenchtown was made a brigadier, 
though one or two very capable subordinates were of the 
opinion that his attack being a partial surprise, he would 
have effected his object much more speedily if he had gone 
straight in with the bayonet. It was a highly meritorious 
action nevertheless, and broke Harrison's advance, sending 
him, though tardily, into winter quarters at Fort Meigs. 
That either side, with the rude equipment of their day and 
situation, were ready to campaign through a winter in 
Michigan, and did so for much of it, speaks volumes for 
their hardihood and resolution. 

The addresses of the American generals of 1812 to their 
troops would make a pretty and unique collection. General 
Harrison told his men that the loss of life at Frenchtown 
was due to British treachery. To these same regiments, 
half composed, and that in their best part, of regulars in the 
very act of invasion, he exclaimed, ' Can the citizens of a free 
country who have taken arms to defend its rights think of 
submitting to an army composed of mercenary soldiers, 
reluctant Canadians goaded to the field by the bayonet, and 
wretched naked savages ? ' 

There can be little doubt that the Americans had been 
in most points hopelessly misled as to the condition of 
things in Canada. There were unquestionably great num- 
bers of recent American settlers in that country, thou- 
sands probably who were in favour of annexation, but in 
most cases isolated, busy unmartial people who were not 
prepared to risk their lives for a mere preference between 
forms of government that were much the same in practice 
to the average farmer. These people, settled often in 
clusters, out of touch, from the engrossing demands of their 
narrow lives, with the prevalent tone of the province, and 



THE WAR IN 1812 323 

at the same time perhaps the most accessible to American 
channels of information, may well, and in all innocence, 
have distorted the latter. But it only remains now to say 
a few words about Dearborn's failure to make headway 
against Montreal, and while on the subject of Canadian 
sympathies to note in passing how little encouragement 
was given to the invaders by the French peasantry of the 
Richelieu country, the district which formerly in Dorchester's 
time had been distinguished above the rest of Lower Canada 
for quite opposite conduct. 

Montreal was as vulnerable as it was important. Its old 
walls, useless enough, had not long before been swept away 
and no means of defence raised by spade or trowel existed. 
With a view to its capture, Dearborn had early in September 
a force of eight thousand men at the head of Lake Champlain, 
upon the Canadian frontier and but some forty miles from 
the city. There it remained doing practically nothing till 
in November it had increased to over ten thousand, half of 
whom were regulars. To oppose them a chain of posts had 
been created along the land frontier, from Ymaska to St. 
Regis, consisting of Major de Salaberry's Canadian Volti- 
geurs and some militia. At Blairfindie, on the old road 
from St. John's to Montreal, a brigade was stationed con- 
sisting of the 109th and 103rd regiments, part of the 8th, 
the Canadian fencibles, some companies of militia, and a 
detachment of artillery with guns, all under the command 
of Major Young, of the 8th. The North- West Company too 
raised a body of voyageurs, while several companies of the 
sedentary militia organised themselves and did garrison 
duty in Quebec and Montreal, thereby releasing the 
regulars and embodied militia for active service. Some 
addition to the defence of the country had arrived during 
the summer, namely the 103rd above mentioned, and the 
1st Royal Scots. 

Beyond a few raids, met by counter raids, Dearborn with 
all his force effected nothing. In November it was reported 
he was going to move with his entire strength on Montreal, 



324 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

and a further call on the militia was made to which they 
responded readily, for nothing is more remarkable than the 
different attitude adopted by the mass of French Canadians 
towards the invasion of 1812 from that prevalent in 1775, 
the more so as the signs of the preceding years had by no 
means pointed to such a display of goodwill among the rank 
and file. In December, after Smythe's repulse, Dearborn too 
went into winter quarters. 

The vital importance of sea power as regards Lake Ontario 
had not been lost sight of during this season, but unfortun- 
ately Prevost's armistice, or rather the unconditional manner 
in which he interpreted his instructions, had allowed so many 
American merchant ships to slip into Sackett's Harbour, 
their principal naval depot, nearly opposite Kingston, as to 
greatly facilitate the despatch with which they made ready 
a strong fleet. Commodore Chauncey, a fairly able seaman, 
had the supervision of the naval department, and by the 
end of the season had so outpaced the British that he 
was able practically to blockade Earle, who commanded 
them, in Kingston harbour. Brock had been anxious to 
attack Sackett's Harbour and destroy this little fleet of war- 
ships in the making, but was prevented by Prevost, who 
was not merely lacking in energy and foresight, but in the 
face of a somewhat ruthless aggressive war cherished foolish 
theories of non-provocation, admirable in peace time, but 
infinitely mischievous in his present situation. In spite of 
Prevost's excellent French accent and his conciliatory 
manners, the mind runs back in vain over the list of 
Canadian Governors or their deputies to find a single one 
who would not have better filled the post in time of war. 
The distress in Upper Canada was now considerable. So 
many farmers and farmers' sons had voluntarily abandoned 
their homes in defence of their country, that the effect told 
severely on a province dependent on agriculture and virtu- 
ally without a detached labouring class. Provisions too, 
and above all clothing, were short. The difficulty in all 
matters of supply when a handful of people scattered over 



THE WAR IN 1812 325 

a huge undeveloped forest country are called upon to play 
the unusual part of combination for defence, can hardly be 
realised without an effort, and any modern parallels for the 
Canada of that day are idle. This, moreover, at a moment 
when the- far-away mother country was fighting for her life 
with what seemed to be her last shilling. Clothing alone, 
above all with winter approaching, was a most serious 
matter, let the women at home work their spinning-wheels 
as they might. A loyal and patriotic society was formed 
for providing this and other necessaries for the men in the 
field and for alleviating the distress caused by their absence 
from home. Chief-Justice Scott was president, and the 
treasurer was Strachan, then Rector of York, the most 
famous schoolmaster, bishop and politician of early Upper 
Canadian annals. There were also the widows and orphans 
of the killed to be looked after. With the help of the Duke 
of Kent, who raised ^"5000 in England, ^"17,000 was the 
total collected in the various provinces. At the close of 
the year the legislature of Lower Canada met. Prevost 
congratulated them on the loyalty of the country and the 
successful resistance made to the enemy. He alluded to 
the events of the year, particularly to Brock's glorious death 
and victory. In return the Assembly voted a liberal sum 
of money, judged by their resources, for the prosecution of 
the war. The legislature of Upper Canada too was called 
together a little later by Sheaffe, now the Lieutenant- 
Governor, at York, where they passed without contention 
several measures pertaining to the militia and military 
matters of technical necessity. 



326 THE MAKING OF CANADA 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE WAR IN 1813 

The divergent views of the two political parties in the 
United States on the war may be conveniently illustrated 
by the language held in Congress this winter by Josiah 
Quincey on the one hand, and Williams, the South Carolinian 
chairman of the military committee, on the other. The 
former denounced the invasion of Canada as 'a cruel, 
wanton, senseless, and wicked attack, in which neither 
plunder nor glory were to be gained, upon an unoffending 
people, bound to us by ties of blood and good neighbour- 
hood, undertaken for the punishment over their shoulders 
of another people three thousand miles away by young 
politicians, fluttering and cackling on the floor of that 
House, half-hatched, the shell still on their heads and their 
pin feathers not yet shed ; politicians to whom reason, 
justice, pity, were nothing, revenge everything.' The 
South Carolinian replied : ' The St. Lawrence must be 
crossed by a well-appointed army of twenty thousand men, 
supported by a reserve of ten thousand. At the same 
moment we move on Canada, a corps of ten thousand more 
must threaten Halifax from the province of Maine. The 
honour and character of the nation require that the British 
power on our borders should be annihilated in this campaign.' 
The news of Napoleon's utter failure and appalling loss of 
men in Russia reached America this spring, and was a great 
blow to the war party. Dr. Eustis, in his Presidential flights, 
had lost such good things as he already had and been 
relegated to obscurity. The American army had been 



THE WAR IN 1813 327 

increased to fifty- five thousand men, mainly destined for the 
invasion of Canada, backed by an innumerable militia. To 
oppose these in the spring of 1813 there were barely seven 
thousand regular troops. Included in this force were five 
colonial corps, the 104th (New Brunswick Regiment), which 
had marched through the wintry forest wilderness to 
Montreal ; the 103rd (Newfoundland Regiment), the Glen- 
garries, the Voltigeurs (French), and the Canadian fencibles 
(mixed). In addition to these were the whole or part of the 
1st, 8th, 41st, 49th, 100th, and a squadron of the 19th 
Dragoons. Later on in the year the 13th and the two 
De Watteville regiments (Germans) arrived. Admiral Sir 
James Yeo, a young sailor of enterprise and varied service, 
with some naval officers and about four hundred seamen for 
the lake service, came too this spring. This, with an Upper 
Canadian militia zealous enough but having their livelihood 
to earn, and a French sedentary militia of doubtful ardour 
and no longer of much use, was a pitiful force with which to 
defend so large a country against such great odds. But the 
exigencies of the Peninsular War and the desperate fight in 
Europe held Great Britain in their grip ; she could do no 
more. 

In the early spring of 181 3 General Dearborn was at 
Sackett's Harbour, opposite Kingston, ready for operations, 
with five thousand regulars and two thousand militia. He 
had also three thousand regulars, besides others, at Buffalo 
watching the Niagara frontier. His orders were to cross the 
ice and attack Kingston and, having captured it, march by 
land on York. This, however, was not attempted. Instead 
of it one of his officers, Major Forsyth, made a midnight 
raid across the river from Ogdensburg and harried the un- 
defended village of Brockville, looting it of goods and stock 
and carrying off fifty of the inhabitants. Colonel Pearson, 
then at Prescott in command of the troops who were ex- 
tended down the St. Lawrence from Kingston, sent a protest 
against this style of warfare but without avail. On Prevost's 
arrival Colonel M'Donnell of the Glengarries requested 



328 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

leave to attack Ogdensburg, which the weak-backed Gover- 
nor refused till his subordinate frightened him into a con- 
cession by the assurance that his own road to Kingston 
would otherwise be insecure. He then assented to a 
' demonstration ' only. M'Donnell had other views, and on 
February 22, with less than five hundred men from the 
Glengarries, the 8th, the Newfoundlanders, the militia, and 
three guns, crossed the ice. The river is here over a mile in 
width. Forsyth was prepared, and pounded the gallant 
company from his batteries with deadly effect in their un- 
protected approach. Nothing daunted, however, they 
reached the American side and dragged their guns through 
the deep snow up on to the high ground. The enemy was 
driven through the town, his rifle fire from the houses being 
silenced by the guns, and the rest of the business left to the 
bayonet. The fort near by containing Forsyth was next 
attacked, one of its outlying batteries rushed, and the other 
reduced to silence, after which the fort itself was carried 
without resistance, as the commander and his men did not 
await the final attack, but with their routed comrades from 
the town retired for some miles southward through the 
woods. This is worthy of mention, as though only a raid 
in force like so many of the affairs in this war, it was not the 
midnight looting of a defenceless village like Forsyth's, for 
which it seems he was awarded promotion, but a most 
daring attack in broad daylight over a bare expanse of deep 
snow swept by artillery and on a fortified position held in 
strength by regular troops. The British casualties were 
about sixty. Among many gallant acts, Captain Jenkin, of 
a New Brunswick U.E. family, continued to lead his com- 
pany of Glengarries against a battery after both arms had 
been shattered by grape till he fell from loss of blood. A 
large supply of arms, ammunition and stores rewarded the 
victors, who burned the barracks and four armed ships that 
were fast in the ice, and Ogdensburg gave no more trouble 
as a base for raiding expeditions. 

The Americans, thanks to Prevost's folly in the preceding 



THE WAR IN 1813 329 

year, were now supreme on Lake Ontario. Chauncey had 
done his work well, and had thirteen ships of war carrying 
eighty-four guns and thirteen hundred sailors. The British 
had nothing to oppose to this, though still in control of 
Lake Erie. Dearborn, having given up the idea of attack- 
ing Kingston, was now in a situation to move on York. So 
at the end of April, when navigation was fairly open, he 
embarked nearly two thousand men, representing four 
regular regiments, some artillery and riflemen, and travers- 
ing the length of the lake, arrived in two days and without 
mishap at York. Toronto harbour is almost landlocked, 
and is virtually formed by a long narrow barren spit running 
out in a south-westerly direction parallel with the trend of 
the coast, like a leg turning a foot shoreward with the toe 
approaching near the mainland and leaving a comparatively 
narrow entrance. A mile within the harbour, at the far 
corner of the rude parallelogram it describes, and at the 
mouth of the little river Don, lay York, the infant Toronto. 
The harbour entrance being easily commanded by cannon, 
the natural landing-place for an enemy was to the westward. 
Here were two or three blockhouses, while the ravine of a 
small stream between them and the town gave some help 
to any scheme of defence, and on this line the meagre 
garrison of about four hundred men, three-fourths of them 
local militia, were intrenched with a few ill-mounted or 
small guns, though such details are in fact scarcely worth 
enumerating. Prevost had failed to make any preparations 
for the defence of the little capital, while Sheaffe, who it 
will be remembered had succeeded Brock as civil governor 
and military commander of the province, though now him- 
self at York, had been almost equally negligent. If the 
place had been abandoned under the plea that no means 
were at hand for its defence, criticism would be disarmed. 
But a valuable warship was being deliberately built there, a 
proceeding which stultifies such a plea on Prevost's behalf, 
who was responsible for it. Sheaffe in his turn had ap- 
parently left twenty heavy guns, intended for the said 



330 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

vessel, but which would have proved invaluable in batteries, 
lying about under the snow. Quite fortuitously, on their 
march from Kingston to the west one hundred and eighty 
men of the 8th Regiment dropped in at the moment of the 
enemy's arrival, raising the total force to six hundred, with 
a few Indians. The Americans, led by General Pike, landed 
under the guns of their fleet to the westward of the harbour's 
mouth. In the intervening woods they encountered the 
small but spirited British force. The result was a foregone 
conclusion, but it was not arrived at till after seven hours' 
hard fighting. A battery was even then uncaptured, but its 
magazine exploding and putting forty men out of action, 
terminated the resistance. Sheaffe drew off about two 
hundred of his regulars, retiring through the town, which 
was untenable, and got them safely away to Kingston. The 
militia, whose homes lay in York county, and the remaining 
regulars, surrendered and were released on parole. If 
pursuit had been contemplated, it was paralysed by the 
terrific explosion of a magazine containing five hundred 
barrels of powder which, hurtling grape-shot and bullets 
stored in the same building in every direction, killed fifty- 
two Americans, disabled one hundred and eighty more, and 
naturally stunned, for the time, all further enterprise. 
General Pike himself, while seated amid his staff, was killed 
by a flying rock. When the Americans recovered they did 
so to some purpose. For though the terms of surrender 
guaranteed immunity to all property, they deliberately 
burned the Parliament buildings which had recently been 
erected, together with all its public documents and library. 
The church was robbed and the town library despoiled, an 
act of which Chauncey was so ashamed that he subsequently 
collected as many as possible of the scattered volumes and 
returned them. Several private houses too were ruined and 
much property carried away. 

This, however, was a costly performance to the invaders, 
as during the subsequent occupation of Washington by the 
British its much more imposing Capitol, with its far more 



THE WAR IN 1813 331 

valuable documents, was destroyed in retaliation ; an action 
frequently denounced by historians without the context. It is 
generally held that by mounting the twenty-three ships' guns 
that SheafTe had left in the mud he might have saved York. 
At any rate, he was soon afterwards superseded, leaving a 
flavour of unpopularity as well as of failure behind him. It 
has been asked too why Dearborn did not hold York and 
thereby cut the connection between eastern and western 
Canada. But with the first favourable wind he sailed away 
across the lake with all his force to the neighbouring Fort 
Niagara, whither reinforcements were rapidly forwarded from 
Sackett's Harbour, till by the end of May his army for 
operations on the Niagara frontier was swelled to six 
thousand men. The earlier scheme of the invaders still held 
good. Harrison's army was to push on from the Detroit 
frontier in the west, brushing Procter aside, while the 
Niagara force beating down all opposition there, was to join 
the other. With the peninsula of Upper Canada thus in 
possession and cleared of British troops, the united force 
would press eastward by land and water down Lake 
Ontario to Kingston and the St. Lawrence and, co-operat- 
ing with the considerable army already acting against 
Montreal, take that flourishing city and so to Quebec. 

Fort George was the first point of attack, standing, as it 
may be remembered, near the outlet of the Niagara river, 
but with the town of Newark lying inconveniently between 
its batteries and the actual river mouth. The British force 
along the thirty miles of Niagara frontier now consisted 
of about eighteen hundred regulars and six hundred militia 
under the command of Brigadier-General Vincent. All that 
could be spared for Fort George was a scant thousand from 
the 49th, 8th, Glengarries, and Newfoundlanders, a few 
gunners, three hundred and fifty militia, and a handful of 
Indians. On the 27th of May, Dearborn, who does not 
seem to have been himself a great fire-eater, sent four 
thousand men to the attack, the vanguard led by Colonel 
Winfield Scott, followed by the remainder under Brigadiers 



332 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

Boyd, Winder, and Chandler. The political soldiers, though 
Chandler and Winder seem to have been such, were 
gradually disappearing under the stress of failure and public 
indignation, and several capable officers were forcing them- 
selves to the front. The American regulars were also improv- 
ing with experience, and some of the provincial irregulars 
had discovered that battles were not won by vainglorious 
bombast, and were beginning to do justice to the sterling 
qualities which they possessed. Yet something must be con- 
ceded to custom ! The southern backwoodsman till within 
present memory was wont to anticipate a personal encounter 
by cracking his heels and flapping his arms upon a stump, 
announcing at the same time his invincible qualities in 
primitive vainglorious vernacular, a blend of the cock-pit 
and the Indian council fire. It was probably with the 
Kentucky rifleman in mind, and most certainly with 
Napoleon on the brain, that the American generals produced 
those early masterpieces of oratory that opened this war 
in unforgettable fashion. These prologues had now been 
mostly abandoned, though the elementary blunders that 
followed them were still rife. The political general still went 
to war with a colonel of regulars at his elbow to prevent 
mistakes or breed friction, as the case might be. Whether 
in war time the politician was least mischievous at the 
front or in the council chamber was perhaps a point worthy 
of consideration. 

The Americans on a still foggy morning landed about 
a mile to the west of the outlet on the open sweep which 
comprised the whole field of action, under the guns of 
Chauncey's powerful fleet and the fire of their own fort, 
Niagara. The landing was checked for a moment by a small 
advanced company with a gun or two under Colonel Meyer. 
But the gunners were soon killed when the whole force of the 
enemy landed and advanced in columns, to be met again by 
the same officer with six hundred men, including a hundred 
and sixty local militia. A most gallant stand was here 
made, and though raked by grape-shot from the fleet the 



THE WAR IN 1813 333 

British repelled several attacks. At length, with the loss 
of two-thirds of their number, including their leader, the 
survivors fell back under cover of a supporting force brought 
forward by Harvey, whose name stands out nobly through- 
out this war. Fort George was for every reason untenable, 
and Vincent after his three hours' fighting and spiking 
guns at the Fort, retired to Beaver Dam, sending word to 
Ormsby and Bisshop, commanding at Erie and Chippewa, 
to join him. This was duly effected, but the Niagara frontier 
was perforce abandoned, and with sixteen hundred regulars, 
Vincent moved westward in the direction of Burlington 
heights. The militia, farm work in the short Canadian 
season being insistent, were in part dismissed. The 
Americans fearing, though groundlessly, a junction with 
Procter, followed the British, who after a forty to fifty 
mile march encamped on the heights above Burlington 
Bay, the extreme western point of Lake Ontario, near the 
present city of Hamilton. Nowadays a fat and ornate 
country of tillage and meadow, fruit orchard and vineyard, 
this was then an almost unbroken forest wilderness. Near 
the present track of the main line from Toronto and 
Hamilton to Niagara a single road then ran through the 
forest, broken here and there by raw clearings, and it was 
in and about one of these and near the present station of 
Stoney Creek that on June the 5th three thousand of the 
Americans under Generals Chandler and Winder, both 
amateurs and politicians, pitched their camp for the night. 
They were now within seven miles of Vincent. The ever- 
active Harvey reconnoitred their position and discovered the 
disposal of the force and the carelessness of the outposts to 
be characteristic of an army commanded by lawyers, though 
not wanting in good troops and good officers. So a night 
attack was resolved upon, and the night was dark beyond 
common. With seven hundred men, therefore, of the 8th 
and 49th, Vincent and Harvey left camp before midnight 
and by two had reached the American position undiscovered. 
This position was a good one only open to attack on its 



334 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

front, but Harvey's estimate of the enemy's lack of vigilance 
was accurate. The unsuspecting outposts were bayoneted 
without a sound, and only a premature shout from some of 
the British soldiers gave the Americans much more than 
time to leap to their feet and seize their arms before the 
seven hundred bayonets were among them. The guns 
were rushed, the gunners bayoneted, and after some brief 
sharp fighting the whole American force within reach was 
routed and scattered in all directions. Both generals, 
several officers, over a hundred prisoners, and all the guns, 
were captured. Vincent withdrew his men before daylight 
should discover their small numbers to the enemy, having 
lost in killed and wounded about a hundred men. The 
effect of the blow was prodigious. The Americans retreated 
on the following day with precipitation, leaving dead un- 
buried, wounded uncared for, and such of their stores as 
they had not time to destroy. Halting at Forty-mile 
Creek en route for Niagara, they were met by Colonel 
Miller of Detroit memory and four hundred men, and 
soon afterwards by General Lewis, who took command 
of the army, now again numbering over three thousand. 
The unexpected sight of a British fleet which Sir James 
Yeo had now scraped together, bringing three hundred 
more men of the 8th and supplies for Vincent, upset again 
the returning confidence of the Americans, whose camp 
came under its fire. Another hurried retreat took place 
to Fort George, leaving tents standing, a great store of 
flour, and nearly a hundred disabled men. The rest 
of their equipage was despatched by water in twenty 
bateaux, all of which were captured by Yeo, who, thanks 
to Chauncey's apathy or timidity, cruised along the 
American shore of the lake, seized some well-stored 
magazines upon it, and took several supply ships bound 
for Niagara. 

Back again at Fort George, with a loss from various causes 
of a thousand men, the American plan had proved an utter 
failure. The 104th Regiment, moreover, had arrived at 



THE WAR IN 1813 335 

Vincent's camp, and the British lines were pushed forward 
again to the posts adjacent to the Niagara river. It was 
during this movement too, at the end of June, that the 
heroine of Upper Canadian song and story, Laura Secord, 
whose monument surmounted by her bust stands in the 
graveyard of Lundy's Lane, gained immortality. 

Now in a stone house at Beaver Dam, an outpost con- 
sisting of half a company of the 104th, under Lieutenant 
Fitzgibbon, had been giving General Dearborn some 
particular annoyance, whereupon Colonel Boerstler of the 
14th U.S. Infantry proposed to surprise it, and with 570 
men started by way of Queenston and St. Davids to carry 
out his plan. The lady in question was the wife of James 
Secord, who lived in Queenston, but as behoved the member 
of a well-known U.E. family, was serving with the militia. 
His wife overheard some American officers in the last- 
mentioned village discussing Boerstler's proposal, and deter- 
mined to warn Fitzgibbon. So setting out then and there, 
and travelling a circuitous woodland course through the 
zone of war of some twenty miles, ran into some Indians 
at dark near Beaver Dam. These at first alarmed her, 
but ultimately took her by request to Fitzgibbon, to whom 
she told her tale. The consequence was that Boerstler and 
his party were themselves surprised by Indians and others 
and compelled to surrender, to the number of 512 officers 
and men, with their colours and two guns. This fresh 
chain of disasters in the face of so small a defending force, 
following upon so promising a start, caused the deepest 
mortification in the United States. Dearborn anticipated 
his recall by resigning on the plea of ill-health, and 
Wilkinson, who had been prominent as a young officer 
in the Revolutionary war under Arnold and Gates, was 
appointed in his place. Much raiding and counter-raiding 
across the river took place during the summer. Several 
brave deeds were performed and many lives were lost, but 
nothing of moment occurred. The number of more recent 
settlers in Upper Canada who showed American sympathies 



336 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

and sometimes more than sympathy, continued to be a cause 
of anxiety, but the sickness which now began to prevail in 
both armies did much to cool their activities. General de 
Rottenburgh, moreover, arrived in July vice Sheaffe as 
Governor or President of Upper Canada and Commander- 
in-Chief. Some of the New York Indians too, chiefly 
Senecas, who had not migrated to Canada, joined the 
Americans and proved very useful, while Yeo and Chauncey 
fought two engagements on Lake Ontario with no very 
decisive results. 

But in the meantime, after a considerable lull in hostilities 
on the western frontier, Procter, who was stationed at 
Sandwich and had been reinforced by part of the 41st, 
became again active, though neither wisely nor willingly. 
Early in May he had attacked Fort Meigs, which Harrison 
had built on the Maumee, and had taken five hundred 
prisoners in a battle before it, but had not the strength to 
carry the Fort itself. Since then he had remained at 
Sandwich. The farming season had now carried off half 
his militia, who had gone home for a time, while the savages 
composing so much of his strength had become restive. 
For Harrison lay with twelve hundred regulars and a mass 
of militia at Seneca near Fort Stephenson, a new post 
upon which the Indians had set their heart. Procter 
consequently marched there and made a vain but gallant 
attempt to storm it. 

Harrison in the meantime, large by comparison though 
his force was, recognised, as did his government, the futility 
of advancing into Canada so long as the British fleet held 
Lake Erie. There was now to be a struggle for it which 
proved one of the memorable incidents of the war. Barclay, 
who had lost an arm at Trafalgar, was in command of the 
six British vessels. The Americans, who if they had not 
been quicker to recognise the vital importance of sea 
power on both lakes, were at least in a position to build 
much quicker, had by the month of August nine vessels, 
more heavily armed than Barclay's, under the command of 



THE WAR IN 1813 337 

Captain Perry of the U.S. navy, a smart and capable 
officer. A few of these had been built some time, but 
being scattered about could not get out of their respective 
harbours for the British who were first afloat. Barclay is 
said, through preferring pleasure to business on a particular 
occasion, to have allowed them to escape and combine at 
Presqu'ille, the chief harbour on the American side, corre- 
sponding to the very poor one of Amherstburg on the other. 
The situation was a pretty but perfect illustration on a 
small scale of the modern theory of sea power. Procter 
had been eaten nearly bare of provisions by ravenous 
Indians whom he dared not offend, and depended on sea 
carriage for more. He had now come almost to his last 
crust, and the stores at Long Point, near the eastern end of 
the lake, could not be moved in the face of Perry's fleet. 
Harrison on his part, with his overpowering force, could not 
cross the Detroit or St. Clair river into Canada even against 
Barclay's small ships of war. The latter had only half 
rations for a few days between them and starvation. It 
was a case of a duel, and that without delay between the 
two small armaments, which would decide the future of the 
two land forces and the fate, as it might well seem, of 
Upper Canada. So on the 18th of September Barclay sailed 
out to engage in the inevitable but unequal trial. Perry's 
nine ships were far superior in weight of metal — as 
President Roosevelt in his work on the maritime side of 
this war is careful to impress — about double, in short. Perry 
again had 532 men, 329 of whom were seamen, 158 soldiers 
(marines), and 45 volunteers. Barclay had 55 seamen, 102 
Canadian sailors whom he describes as mere boatmen, and 
he was compelled to make up the necessary complement by 
shipping 250 officers and men of the much-enduring 41st 
Regiment. The only two considerable vessels on either 
side were of little over 300 tons burden. The engagement 
began about twelve, and was most obstinately contested 
for some hours. The flagships Lawrence and Detroit^ 
carrying Perry and Barclay respectively, fought desperately 

Y 



338 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

together for half that time and were terribly shattered, the 
former rendered helpless and actually striking her flag 
after Perry had boarded a fresh vessel, the Niagara, which 
had hitherto kept out of action. The guns of some of 
Barclay's six ships were almost useless at a range at which 
their opponents could punish them severely. His own 
vessel, unable to await her supply of guns from the east, 
had been filled with an ill-assorted lot from the fort at 
Amherstburg. Barclay himself was badly wounded, and 
after a resistance conducted with great skill and hardly 
less creditable than a victory, and with a loss of 140 in 
killed and wounded his utterly dismantled ships succumbed 
to, or tried to escape from the two or three Americans that 
were still manageable and consequently supreme. The 
victory was complete, though the loss in men was nearly 
equal, and at one moment it actually hung in the balance. 
Perry deserved success and used it well, though with such 
superiority in ships, gun power, and trained men, had he 
been beaten no such honour as remained to Barclay could 
possibly have been his. But the little fight was of con- 
siderable import, and should have been of much more. It 
came as a godsend to the Washington Government, who 
were starving for something good to say. Madison, though 
not greatly addicted to the Kentucky-Napoleonic style, was 
equal to the occasion and pronounced it 'a victory never 
surpassed in lustre if in magnitude.' Yet Trafalgar was 
still fresh in men's minds ! 

Lake Erie now remained to the Americans. There was 
nothing left for Procter but a rapid retreat through the 
peninsula to Niagara and supplies, while Harrison started 
in pursuit. The former, his white force reduced to about 
seven hundred but accompanied by over a thousand Indians, 
having first destroyed Fort Maiden, made his way to Lake 
St. Clair and the mouth of the Thames. A week after the 
battle Harrison crossed Lake Erie from Sandusky, landed 
five thousand men on Canadian soil near Amherstburg, 
and advancing northward to Detroit there met another 



THE WAR IN 1813 339 

thousand. From this base on October 2nd he started up 
the Thames in pursuit of Procter with thirty-five hundred 
men, including a swarm of Kentucky irregulars, horse and 
foot, with their veteran Governor Shelby, a famous old 
pioneer and frontier fighter of Welsh blood, who, originally 
from the North Carolina Alleghanies, had been one of the 
makers of Kentucky. Harrison had also with him two 
hundred and fifty Indians. We cannot here follow Procter in 
his toilsome retreat for some forty-five miles up the Thames, 
his material, like that of his pursuers, accompanying him in 
boats. He was accused at his subsequent court-martial, 
and in contemporary correspondence, of dilatoriness both in 
the start and the retreat, of failure to destroy bridges over 
creeks, and of hampering himself with useless baggage. The 
two forces passed through the present town of Chatham, 
and at the Moravian Mission, twenty-five miles above, 
Procter was forced to stand at bay. His men, mostly of 
the 41st, had been long ill-fed, and great numbers were sick 
in hospital. They had borne the brunt of two seasons' 
campaigning and fighting against continual odds with 
singular tenacity and great credit, and had never been 
accustomed to retreat. About four hundred of them fit to 
fight were now drawn up at right angles to the river in an 
open forest near the Moravian town, together with forty 
Canadian dragoons, while Tecumseh's Indians, reduced by 
desertions to barely five hundred, held the woods upon 
their right. The coming and going of Procter's Indians, 
their perversities and enormous appetites, which owing to 
the paucity of white troops it had been imperative to 
humour, had long been the commander's leading difficulty. 

The battle was soon over. Twelve hundred Kentucky 
horsemen, though checked for a moment by a couple of 
volleys, came on with the confidence of numbers helped by 
the moral support of 2500 infantry just behind them, and 
rode by sheer weight clean over the slender British lines. 
The spirit that had prolonged so many hopeless fights and 
turned many that seemed so into victory, in a moment 



340 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

as it were, collapsed and the broken companies surrendered 
without further effort. A great strain had been laid for a 
long time upon these men, and now under the depressing 
conditions of retreat and scanty food, with a long wilderness 
and yet more starvation in their rear, confronted moreover 
by a well-fed, successful force of many times their number, 
there is nothing strange in the sudden moral collapse of 
these hitherto enduring and courageous men. About six 
hundred of them, including 150 sick in hospital and their 
attendants, were taken prisoners. The dragoons escaped, 
and Procter, who would have left a good reputation had 
he fallen, escaped with them. The Indians in the woods 
on the right maintained for some time the unequal contest, 
the brave Tecumseh falling at their head. His body was 
secured and carried away, but the Kentuckians falling on 
another mistaken for it, imitated the barbarous custom of 
some Indian squaws, and going even further made razor- 
strops of the skin ; a singularly misdirected piece of 
savagery, since Tecumseh himself had an untarnished re- 
putation for mercy. Prevost chose to publicly censure, 
and with contumely, this broken remnant of the 41st. 
Later judgment has emphatically repudiated the justice 
of his criticism. Few indeed would exchange the reputation 
of these much-enduring men and officers in the war of 181 2 
for that of Prevost himself, who might almost be called its 
evil genius. Harrison reported that his men won the battle 
1 by superior prowess.' Statistics make comment needless. 
Procter, however, was court-martialled and found guilty of 
the mistakes already mentioned, but acquitted as regards 
personal conduct, his previous valour and activity being 
warmly recognised. Harrison, having burned the missionary 
station of Moravian-town, evacuated Canada by the route 
he had entered it with a good deal of loot added to his 
legitimate captures, though most of it appears to have been 
afterwards lost in a lake storm. The militia were sent 
home and the General, with over a thousand regulars, 
proceeded to Buffalo and the Niagara frontier, where the 



THE WAR IN 1813 341 

Americans, it will be remembered, occupied Fort George 
alone outside their own territory. Their chief attention, 
together with that of the two newly appointed generals, 
Wilkinson and Wade Hampton, had been diverted to a 
great effort against Montreal, of which more anon. In the 
meantime M'Clure, a militia brigadier, remained in command 
at Niagara with about three thousand men. At the news of 
Procter's defeat, it was naturally assumed by the British on 
the Niagara that Harrison's victorious army from the west 
would be upon them. So General Vincent at St. Davids, 
now again in chief command, gathering his troops together 
abandoned the river front and withdrew to his former strong 
post on Burlington heights, where Procter and his handful 
of survivors from Moravian-town soon joined him. Orders, 
however, soon came from Prevost to evacuate the whole 
peninsula of Upper Canada and retire on Kingston. This 
catastrophe was happily averted by the good sense and 
subsequently better information of Vincent and his officers, 
who at a council of war determined to ignore it. But on 
their brief retirement from the Niagara frontier M'Clure had 
let loose a whole horde of plunderers who ravaged the 
defenceless country, not merely of property, but even to the 
abduction and imprisonment of loyalist residents. He was 
aided in this by Wilcocks, the renegade ex-member of the 
Upper Canadian legislature who, with a band of disaffected 
American settlers in Canada, gave a specially virulent and 
personal touch to such outrages. Bands of defence were 
organised by the U.E. militiamen at home on leave, who 
caught eighteen of these marauders on one occasion and 
hung fifteen of them on the spot as traitors. If any veterans 
of the Revolutionary war from Eastern New York or the 
Carolinas were settled hereabouts, old memories must surely 
have been stirred by such doings, which helped at any rate 
to perpetuate the bitter feelings of their fathers. 

As early in December the British, with slight resistance, 
moved back again to the river front, M'Clure evacuated 
Fort George with much despatch, signalising his departure 



342 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

from Canadian soil by a dastardly act. For some two 
months previously he had procured the sanction of Arm- 
strong, the War Secretary, to destroy Newark, with sufficient 
notice to the inhabitants, should the measure be of strategic 
urgency. And now on a bitter December night, after he 
had decided to leave Canadian soil, he set fire to the 
town at sunset, with half an hour's warning and without a 
shadow of excuse. Thus a well-built and, as described by 
every one, an attractive little town of some 150 houses, 
two churches, and a few public buildings, was burned 
to the ground, and four hundred women and children turned 
out into the rigours of a Canadian winter's night. The 
conscience or the fears of this foolish and malevolent 
amateur were so quickened at the sight of the British 
troops, who had been sent forward at the news, that he 
hurried across the river leaving all his tents standing and 
Fort George intact with many guns and much material. 
So the British at any rate recovered a vastly improved 
fortress, besides some newly built barracks that M'Clure's 
panic had not permitted him to destroy. His brutal act 
disgusted his own countrymen and raised a storm of in- 
dignation in Canada, while Prevost's kid-glove tendencies 
were more than ever denounced. 

General Sir Gordon Drummond, the new civil and military 
commander of Upper Canada, together with General Riall, 
arrived at this moment. Vincent had gone east, but Colonel 
Murray, a daring and active officer, was there to put the 
new commanders en rapport with the local situation. This 
resulted in a dire retribution for the burning of Newark. 
Fort Niagara was stormed with a loss of four hundred in 
killed, wounded and prisoners to the defenders, and an 
aggressive campaign instituted which in less than a month's 
time had laid the entire American frontier from Lake 
Ontario to Lake Erie in ashes, including the town of Buffalo, 
which was defended by two thousand men, and more than 
half the ships with which Perry had won his victory. Fort 
Niagara was garrisoned, to be held, as it turned out, till the 



THE WAR IN 1813 343 

peace. And thus ended the second year of the war in 
western Canada, leaving the province swept clear of the 
enemy and their principal post on the American side of 
the river in British hands. It now only remains to say a 
few words on the doings in the neighbourhood of Montreal, 
where a greater display of force had been made by the 
Americans, but much less achieved in the way of injury to 
their opponents. 

On May 28th, the very day on which the Americans were 
taking Fort George, Sir George Yeo and his fleet, carrying 
seven hundred and fifty regulars, had advanced against 
Sackett's Harbour, before described as nearly opposite to 
Kingston, and in a manner its American counterpart. Its 
former large garrison was now reduced to about nine hundred 
regulars and four or five hundred Albany militia. Unfor- 
tunately the prospects and the ardour of the attacking 
force were stultified by the blighting presence of Prevost 
himself, for on this occasion the troops were actually in the 
boats with the prospect of effecting something like a 
surprise, and full of confidence. The Commander-in-Chief, 
however, whistled them on board again, and nobody to this 
day knows why. After giving the garrison this timely 
warning, he was persuaded to make the attempt again 
under less promising conditions at dawn the next day. 
But this time there was not a breath of wind, and the ships 
could not approach near enough to the shore to cover the 
landing. This was, however, ultimately effected on Horse 
Island to the west of the harbour, and connected by a 
causeway with the mainland. At the end of the causeway 
stood the Albany militia, well posted and with a gun, but 
only to vanish like smoke at the approach of the British, 
and be seen no more. Owing to the immobility of the 
becalmed vessels carrying the field guns, the attack had to 
be made without artillery. But it was so far successful, 
after a smart fight with the American regulars and no little 
loss on both sides, that the enemy went the length of setting 
fire to their ships in the harbour and to their barracks, 



344 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

preparatory to an evacuation. But at this moment the 
fatuity which seemed to seize upon the hapless Prevost, 
whenever the wrong thing could possibly be said or done, 
again took possession of him, and he ordered a retreat. 
Major Drummond guaranteed him success if he would give 
him but a few minutes, but this singular man, solicitous 
apparently as ever for the feelings of his enemy at the ex- 
pense of his friends, was almost fiercely resolute in his scuttle 
policy, and silenced all protest. So after a loss of 250 in 
killed and wounded, he re-shipped his forces and sailed away. 
Yet six months afterwards, as we have seen, he berated the 
gallant 41st as cowards and sent Procter to a court-martial. 
It was fortunate for Prevost that he had no superior within 
three thousand miles, and lamentable for Canada. 

After this there was a long lull, due chiefly to the atten- 
tion bestowed by Dearborn on York and the Niagara 
frontier. On his retirement, when Wilkinson and Hampton 
were appointed to the northern army, it was decided, after 
some difference of opinion, to make a great effort against 
Montreal. Wilkinson, now in chief command, was to con- 
centrate his division near Sackett's Harbour, and thence to 
descend the St. Lawrence, while Hampton, who had taken 
over the force which had been cantoned all this time at 
the foot of Lake Champlain, was to march down the 
Chateauguay river to its confluence with the other above 
Montreal, and join forces at He Perrot. Hampton had 
over 4000 regular infantry, ten guns with artillerymen, 
some cavalry, and 1500 militia. By the end of September 
he had moved forward to Four Corners, just above the 
spot where the Chateauguay river enters Canadian territory. 
It was not till a month later that Wilkinson was ready to 
move from Sackett's Harbour, and the advance was begun 
simultaneously by both armies. Wilkinson had under 
him nearly 8000 men, mostly regulars, while watching 
Hampton with a view of checking and obstructing him at 
every point was De Salaberry and his 300 Voltigeurs, with 
80 fencibles under Ferguson, and about 200 Indians. He 



THE WAR IN 1813 345 

was supported on the day of battle by 600 of the embodied 
French militia under Colonel M'Donnell of the Glengarries, 
who had drilled his men with considerable effect, and 
brought them up by a remarkable forced march. 

Hampton decided for the Chateauguay route, and on 
October 25th, the fourth day's advance down the river, in 
an intervening tract of forest, behind which lay an open 
country all the way to the St Lawrence — a fact which gives 
special significance to this famous incident — he ran into 
the man who created it blocking his path to Montreal. 
De Salaberry, in short, was astride the road, and partially 
protected by an abatis ; his three hundred and odd regulars 
and fifty Indians extended into the forest, with their left on 
the river, which was only fordable at some rapids in their 
rear. These were guarded on the further shore against a 
rear attack by some of M'Donnell's militia. Hampton 
cannot be accused of over-confidence. It is a slightly con- 
fused but absolutely definite and altogether wonderful 
story, both in detail and results. On the night of October 
25th, General Izard, another South Carolinian, held Hamp- 
ton's main force in Salaberry's front, while Colonel Purdy, 
with a United States infantry regiment, and a number of 
light troops, was despatched through the woods to cross 
the ford which had been duly noted by their scouts. Purdy 
lost himself in the woods, and it was past noon on the next 
day when scattering shots from near the ford set Izard's 
3500 men in motion. Bearing down on De Salaberry's 
extended handful, they drove in his pickets, and in due 
course the Voltigeurs themselves to a second line of defence 
in some shallow ravines nearer the ford. De Salaberry 
alone remained, as attested by M'Donnell, and seizing 
his bugler boy by the collar made him sound the advance 
lustily. This brought up M'Donnell with his men to the 
support of the retreating regulars, and yet more a happy 
inspiration prompted that officer to practise a ruse that 
went a long way towards deciding the day, for he caused 
every available bugler to scatter out into the woods and 



346 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

make as much noise as he was able, and all his men to 
cheer loudly, while a hundred fresh Indians arriving at this 
moment spread out and filled the forest with their war- 
whoops. Under the impression that a large force was in 
front, these measures gave pause to the advancing foe. 
The Canadians renewed their fire, and pushed forward again 
in great strength to where De Salaberry with extraordinary 
coolness had apparently remained alone. Impressed by 
the firing, the clamour, the bugle-calls and war-whoops 
from all directions in the woods, disappointed moreover at 
the evident failure of Purdy to force the ford on to the 
Canadian flank and rear, the Americans retired, whether in 
order or disorder does not seem clear, and is of no con- 
sequence since they retired for good. Purdy in the mean- 
time, having scattered an advanced post of undisciplined 
Beauharnois militia, merely placed there to give warning, 
advanced on the ford. Here M'Donnell had stationed a 
company of his trained French militia under Daley, who, 
pouring into the Americans an effective fire, re-crossed the 
river to his main body. This was under the two Duches- 
nays, and posted in part along the nearer bank, kept up a 
hot fusilade across the water. Disconcerted by this, 
impressed, like Izard, by the far-extended uproar in the 
surrounding woods, fatigued perhaps with a night and 
half a day of wandering in the forest, Purdy and his men 
also fell back and beyond doubt in great confusion, for 
they began firing wildly on one another in most destructive 
fashion. Straggling back to headquarters, they materially 
helped to confirm the idea already current on the north 
bank of the river that they were confronted by a strong 
force. Incredible as it seems, Hampton precipitately aban- 
doned the enterprise, gave the order to retire, sent word to 
Wilkinson not to expect him, and facing about marched 
his whole force ingloriously back to Plattsburg on Lake 
Champlain. This hopelessly inefficient general was given, 
it seems, to drink, but Purdy was not, and his fiasco at the 
ford at the head of over two thousand men was un- 



THE WAR IN 1813 347 

pardonable. It was not a very bloody affair this, a dozen 
Canadians and less than a hundred Americans being the 
extent of the casualties ; otherwise it was a kind of modern 
Thermopylae, blocking the open road to Montreal and 
possibly saving the State. The resolution of De Salaberry, 
who throughout the war was invaluable, and the spirit of 
hisVoltigeurs proved of incalculable benefit. To M'Donnell 
belonged almost equal credit. What would have happened 
if Hampton had behaved like an ordinary normal com- 
mander instead of like a worse than madman it would be 
ill saying. Izard's force alone could have overwhelmed 
with ease the little company in front of them, more than 
half militiamen never before under serious fire. They were 
disciplined regiments with many admirable officers among 
them — Wool for one, who has left it upon record that for 
years afterwards no American officer would admit to having 
been at Chateauguay. It must be presumed they had 
nothing to say in the matter, and were the victims of a 
general, who, whether drunk or jealous, for he hated 
Wilkinson, deserved shooting more thoroughly than any com- 
mander within my historical knowledge. Prevost's addic- 
tion to lost opportunities was trifling to this. Poor Hull, 
who was actually sentenced to be shot, though acquitted, was 
by comparison a venial sinner, the victim of circumstances, 
inexperience, and others' blunders. Some American his- 
torians brush away Chateauguay as a battle qua battle, and 
regard it as a trifling check which merely gave a feeble 
excuse to Hampton to thwart Wilkinson and back out of 
an expedition he hated because not devised and wholly 
commanded by himself. This seems almost plausible, for 
it is otherwise unintelligible. But Canada did not look at it 
in this way, and indeed had this opportunity not been 
boldly given him, Hampton would have been compelled to 
march on. So De Salaberry may fairly be said, on the face 
of it, together with M'Donnell and the staunch behaviour of 
all his men, to have very possibly saved Montreal. At 
any rate so brilliant a deed, performed almost wholly by 



348 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

French Canadians, was from every point of view peculiarly 
acceptable. It should be said that some companies of 
the De Watteville Regiment were lower down the 
Chateauguay river. It may also be added that Prevost 
arrived on the scene after all was over, wrote the despatch 
to his Government, treated the business as a mere outpost 
affair, took most of the credit to himself for its valuable 
result, and gave the rest to De Watteville who was not 
within miles of the field. He did not even mention 
M'Donnell. The truth, however, came out, and that gallant 
officer was made aC.B.,but he felt the injustice of excluding 
De Salaberry to whom, in a letter extant, he attributes the 
chief honour, and furthermore he personally importuned the 
Government to confer the same distinction on his friend, 
which they eventually did. Prevost and M'Donnell both 
put Hampton's force at seven thousand. But Hampton was 
not shot, nor, so far as I know, reprimanded. 

Wilkinson also was said to be intemperate, and as a 
friend of Aaron Burr had been suspected a few years previ- 
ously of those unorthodox ambitions and revolutionary 
designs in the south-west which brought the other to grief. 
But now he was journeying down the St. Lawrence towards 
Montreal with nearly nine thousand men, a force one might 
think should have been more than sufficient to overwhelm 
a place so scantily defended. He had with him too some 
good officers — Macombe, afterwards Commander-in-Chief, 
and Forsyth, ever active, besides Generals Brown and Lewis, 
both of approved worth. Unlike the condition of things on 
Montgomery's advance in 1775, Wilkinson found the popu- 
lation, just here part British and part French, universally 
hostile. Chauncey had been endeavouring with only partial 
success to blockade Kingston, but several gunboats had got 
out and followed on the heels of Wilkinson's flotilla to its 
no small annoyance. The only two regular regiments, and 
those weak in numbers, available for the serious business in 
hand were the 49th and 89th, with some companies of 
fencibles and Voltigeurs and a few artillery. These were 



THE WAR IN 1813 349 

grouped for the time under Colonel Morrison, while Captain 
Dennis of the 49th and Queenston memory commanded 
three hundred British militia of the counties of Glengarry 
and Dundas, in all not over a thousand men. Montreal in 
the meantime was in the hands of the sedentary militia, a 
force whose disposition was now beyond doubt, but whose 
efficiency remains an unknown quantity, as it was never 
tested, but it could not possibly have been very great. Even 
with the knowledge of Hampton's failure, which Wilkinson 
was not yet in possession of, the prospects of Montreal may 
well have seemed to be tolerably hopeless. 

The progress during these early November days of the 
American army by land and water to the foot of the Long 
Sault rapids was accompanied by various incidents and skir- 
mishes of slight consequence, but on November nth was 
fought the battle of Chrystler's farm, which decided the fate of 
Montreal and dashed Wilkinson's hopes in a manner scarcely 
less sensational than that in which Chateauguay had baffled 
Hampton. Indeed it was more so, as there was a tougher 
fight, and the general was not an amateur, though he appears 
to have been himself sick in bed during the action. At the 
moment of the battle Wilkinson with his main force was at 
Williamsburg. General Brown with the vanguard of the 
army had safely negotiated the Long Sault rapids below, 
and Boyd's brigade was to follow when Morrison with the 
49th and 89th, and indeed the whole little force as already 
described, and some eight hundred in number, came up and 
compelled him to a rearguard action. Morrison, accom- 
panied and assisted by Harvey of Stoney Creek renown, 
drew up his men on the open fields of Chrystler's farm, 
his right on the river and his left on pine-woods, exposing 
a front of nearly half a mile. To be precise, it was com- 
posed of six hundred and forty men of the 49th and 89th 
and two hundred Voltigeurs, fencibles, and artillery, with 
a score of Indians and two six-pounders. Against this 
Wilkinson, according to his own despatch, threw two 
and a half brigades consisting of eighteen hundred men, 



350 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

to be followed later by six hundred more ; and the 
fight began at half-past two. General Boyd, who was 
in command, made repeated efforts, according to his orders, 
to turn Morrisons left flank. Failing there and in front, 
a strong attack supported by cavalry was then made 
on the right near the river under Colonel Pearson. This 
handful of regulars from their paucity had to support each 
other from left to right of the field, and they seem to have 
been not only most skilfully handled, but as staunch as 
they were active. They not only preserved their few guns, 
which were specially struck at, but captured one of the 
enemy's and finally repulsed the latter with such decision 
that a body of six hundred men had to be despatched to 
support their retreat. The casualties on the British side 
were one hundred and eighty ; on that of the Americans 
three hundred and forty, besides a hundred prisoners. It 
was now getting dark, and under cover of the night Boyd 
carried his men across the St. Lawrence, and the next day 
they ran the rapids of the Long Sault and joined the van- 
guard under Brown near Cornwall, about eighty miles above 
Montreal. Wilkinson was himself incapacitated during the 
action at Chrystler's farm with the same ailment it was 
said that afflicted Hampton. It is not at first apparent 
why this fight at Chrystler's, brilliant little affair though it 
was, should be held as one of the decisive engagements of 
the war, sharing, that is to say, with Chateauguay the 
honour of having saved Montreal in 1813. Four hundred 
men was a slight loss to the enemy out of seven or eight 
thousand, but its moral effect was sufficient to influence a 
weak and irresolute general at a moment when he received 
a much more staggering blow. For on the day after 
Chrystler's farm Wilkinson got Hampton's message an- 
nouncing his withdrawal to Lake Champlain. Wilkinson 
raged and put his rage upon paper, and with justice. He 
then called a council of war, which decided on the prompt 
abandonment of the expedition and its objects and a retire- 
ment to winter quarters. The wrath of the American 



THE WAR IN 1813 351 

nation, or of the war party at any rate, was great, and well it 
may have been. Readers of this book may contrast this 
spirit with that of Arnold's march to Quebec, and yet more 
with the tenacity with which Montgomery's raw men stuck 
to the Plains of Abraham, half-clad through a bitter winter, 
while to travel outside our subject into the campaigns of 
Washington, one finds another order of things, and that too 
among what was sometimes but a mere militia. One may 
well ask what was it that thus ailed, with rare exceptions, 
these American troops and their leaders who invaded 
Canada in 18 12- 13. The numbers stated here are in all 
cases their own ; those of the British we have very pre- 
cisely. If Hampton's conduct can be explained by in- 
sobriety and malevolence towards his rival, surely a council of 
war, above all with an amateur general at its head, would in 
ordinary cases have shouted down such palpable dishonour. 
But Wilkinson had no motives of jealousy at least, and he 
too called a council of war. What point of view would 
officers commanding seven thousand regular troops within 
a few days' easy march of the practically defenceless city 
which spelt their final triumph be considering when they 
threw the whole thing up ? They lacked nothing in food nor 
material. Could it be because a thousand or fifteen hundred 
active troops were worrying their march ? Had a succession 
of incredibly bad commanders blighted the spirit of the 
regular soldier and filled the militiaman with an almost 
chronic panic? Did the American armies miss the spirit 
and the element of New England which in former wars had 
taken the lead, both as organisers and combatants? The 
people of other States would probably not accept such a 
suggestion. But to the impartial inquirer with a reasonable 
knowledge of the Seven Years' War and that of the Revo- 
lution it is not easy to imagine an American combination of 
this era without the cool heads, the varied resources of 
Massachusetts and Connecticut with their sturdy and in- 
telligent battalions. Fortunately perhaps for Canada, New 
England had practically held aloof. There was indeed 



352 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

something like an understanding between these provinces and 
the British that they should annoy each other as little as 
possible, on land at least, and even upon the coasts, where 
such distinctions were difficult, there was strong evidence of 
this feeling. Some American historians have not spared 
the Puritan Commonwealths for the part they played. 
But it may be remembered that the Canadian war was one 
purely of aggression, a policy from the first denounced by 
New England. Nor was it a question of defending the soil 
of the United States against an enemy's designs. The raids 
of the British were purely retaliatory, made as it were in 
self-defence, without any ulterior design, and with the sole 
object of shortening the war. These were mainly directed, 
as was natural and right from the British point of view, 
against those regions which had especially challenged them 
as the fomenters of the strife. It was altogether a curious 
situation, without precedent, perhaps, in its way, and only 
made possible by the ill-assorted and but yet half-united 
elements which then composed the American Federation. 



THE WAR IN 1814 353 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE WAR IN 1 8 14 

Sir George Prevost met the legislature of Lower 
Canada in January. There had been a great dearth of 
specie for carrying on the war. This had been met in 18 12 
by an Act authorising the issue of army bills bearing 4 per 
cent, interest, and payable in London, which proved a great 
success, and a further Act was now passed increasing the 
limit to ;£i, 500,000, all of which was redeemed in 1815. 
The Lower House being relieved from any personal con- 
tact with the war, devoted itself to a campaign against the 
Executive and Legislative Council, and to raking up the 
old grievances of Craig's day, such as the forcible suppres- 
sion of Le Canadienne and the action taken in connection 
with it. Arising out of this too was a measure passed for 
disqualifying the Chief-Justice and the Judges of the King's 
Bench from sitting in the Council, which, whether within or 
without their constitutional powers, of which they had 
somewhat enlarged ideas, was promptly thrown out by the 
august assembly to whom they thus ventured to dictate. 
The root of the whole matter was a grievance against 
Sewel and Monck, chief-justices of the province and of 
Montreal respectively, whom they accused of being the 
instigators and evil genii of Governor Craig's somewhat 
peremptory methods. If malcontents had been at the 
front with De Salaberry or Drummond they would have 
frequently wished, no doubt, for one hour of Craig. That 
they were not was no fault of theirs, many of them, in- 
cluding the brilliant young Papineau of after notoriety in 

z 



354 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

the rebellion of 1837-38, were good militiamen, and would, 
no doubt, have led their companions with ardour against 
the Americans had the military dispositions of the moment 
required it. But as the militia of Lower Canada was only- 
used in the field to a limited extent, the province having 
been comparatively immune, they had no opportunity of 
vindicating their character for militant loyalty in the eyes 
of those who objected, and not without reason, to their ill- 
timed and rather foolish political attitude. It was quite 
true that they had at present rather the shadow than the 
substance of the British Constitution. Their Upper House 
neither had nor needed the moderation of the House of 
Lords, and were financially independent as we have seen. 
But this Lower House, on the other hand, cherished 
aspirations which quite failed to appreciate the limitations 
of even the British Constitution. Neither they nor the 
times were ripe for really responsible government. That 
the claimants should think otherwise is perfectly natural, 
but they believed themselves entitled to much more 
authority than belonged or even to-day belongs to the 
British House of Commons. They were under the impres- 
sion that they could make laws independently of the 
Governor in Council, and in short had been sent to Quebec 
to be the absolute rulers of the colony. Stuart, a Scotsman 
who in later times held high office and was made a baronet, 
was among the leaders of this mainly French party, to 
become himself in time a target for the same shafts that 
he was now levelling at those in power. The Lower House, 
without evidence or examination, passed articles of impeach- 
ment on Sewell and Monk, which the Upper House 
absolutely condemned not merely because they had not 
themselves been consulted, but because the articles were 
enacted in quite irregular and unconstitutional fashion. 
The dominant party in the Assembly were greatly wroth 
and demanded that their ' articles of impeachment ' should 
be presented direct to the Prince Regent, that Stuart, with 
an appropriation of £2000, should be immediately sent to 



THE WAR IN 1814 355 

England to prosecute the matter, and that the two judges 
should be, in the meantime, suspended. Prevost had no 
objection to forwarding the address, but the suspension of 
the two most important functionaries in the colony on a 
mere majority vote of the House of Assembly unsupported 
by any admissible evidence, was of course absurd, and 
plainly demonstrated the fact that if the Legislative 
Council were inclined to be too autocratic, they were not 
without justification in the crude conception that the 
Assembly still had of its powers. The selection of this 
critical moment, however, to rake up bygone grievances, 
when none of any real consequence were pressing, and a 
great struggle for existence with a powerful foe upon their 
borders was going forward, puts them altogether out of 
court. It will be enough to say that Chief-Justice Sewell 
felt called upon to go home and defend himself, bearing 
with him an abundance of spontaneous testimony from the 
leading people of both nationalities to his character and 
public conduct. No doubt there were many imperfections 
in the Canadian body politic, but it was hardly the time for 
violent agitation on the subject, much less on issues now 
some time dead, and that even in quiet times might well 
have been buried. 

The legislature of Upper Canada were also called to- 
gether in February 1814 by Sir Gordon Drummond, and sat 
for a month. War was much too near these men who 
had been burned out of their very Parliament House, and 
some even out of their own dwellings, for wordy broils on 
civic trifles. Most of their talk was of carrying on the war, 
and of ways and means so far as they could assist in it. A 
few of the members were prisoners in the United States, 
two had turned traitors, Wilcocks, of course, for one, and 
were fighting in the enemy's ranks. 

The first movements of the new year were made by Wil- 
kinson, eager to obliterate his disgrace. He had withdrawn 
much of his army from their winter quarters on the Salmon 
river and in the St. Lawrence neighbourhood to the old 



356 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

camp at Plattsburg on Lake Champlain, though not without 
annoyance from Colonel Hercules Scott and a thousand 
men who followed him. He had sent Brown with two 
thousand men to Sackett's Harbour, and had with him in 
March twice that number with which to make the attack on 
the Canadian frontier that was to retrieve his fame. This 
supreme and final effort of Wilkinson's need not take up 
our space. Before the ice had melted he led nearly his 
whole force a few miles across the border to be repulsed at 
the Lacolle river, a tributary of the Richelieu which crossed 
his march, by a small British and Canadian force, chiefly 
under Major Handcock. After a stone mill, which was a 
leading point of defence and attack, the engagement is 
known as Lacolle Mill. Wilkinson after failing to force the 
position, in holding which some companies of the 13th and 
a few marines were conspicuous, fell back again to Platts- 
burg and to retirement, enlivened by a court-martial of a 
singularly indulgent disposition. This should be a sufficient 
tribute to the valour of the defenders, who fought, said the 
witnesses at Wilkinson's trial, with desperate bravery ; one 
company, according to an artillery captain, ' made a charge 
on our guns, receiving their fire, and that of two whole 
brigades of infantry at the same time.' 

The Americans had recently built a small fleet for 
service on Lake Champlain, which found shelter at Otter 
Creek, a harbour on the Vermont side, while the British 
had also some vessels at Isle aux Noix of historic 
memory a few miles down the Richelieu. But it 
was once again on the Niagara frontier that the really 
serious business of the year was to be done and the 
two most fiercely contested battles of the whole war, those 
of Chippewa and Lundy's Lane, were to be fought. Yeo 
in the preceding summer had to some extent got the 
upper hand of Chauncey, but this winter the American 
commodore had increased his fleet while icebound in 
Sackett's Harbour, and with the open season hoped to 
reverse the situation. Brown with his two thousand men 



THE WAR IN 1814 357 

as before mentioned was at Sackett's Harbour, but in March 
was ordered west to the Niagara frontier, giving Prevost 
another excellent opportunity to attack that naval station 
on the ice and destroy the fleet. But Prevost's old tenderness 
towards Sackett's Harbour was still in the ascendant. Yeo, 
however, had also been building ships during the winter at 
Kingston, and admitted no inferiority to Chauncey. The 
active General Drummond was in command here, and the 
two together persuaded Prevost to consent, which he did, 
though apparently with some reluctance, to an attack on 
Oswego, a post now of secondary importance to Sackett's, 
but of some consequence as a depot of military stores. 
Yeo sailed with two frigates just launched, and six smaller 
ships, sloops, and brigs with gunboats. A little over a 
thousand troops, mostly regulars, under Drummond went 
with him. Fortunately Prevost did not accompany the 
expedition, for just as the British were commencing the 
attack they were blown off the coast by a sudden gale, 
which would have been to Sir George an altogether too 
tempting opportunity for sparing Oswego. It gave the 
latter, however, which had only three hundred and odd 
regulars in the fort protecting it, a chance to call in some of 
the local militia. They proved of no use in action, affording 
a great contrast to their counterparts in Upper Canada, who 
fought with great determination. They scarcely ever were 
in this war, and one can only suppose that they turned out, 
either from curiosity as spectators or in the hope of plunder. 
On the following day Yeo returned to the attack, and after 
a good deal of artillery fire between the land batteries and 
the ships, the British force was landed. The militia in the 
bordering woods ran the moment they came into action, 
while the regulars, quite outnumbered, were driven into the 
fort, and very soon out of it, though not before a hundred 
of the attacking force in all had been killed and wounded, 
for the defensive capacities of the place were really formid- 
able. Oswego, though not at the moment fully stocked, 
yielded a large supply of stores besides a few small vessels 



358 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

to the captors, who destroyed the fort and the public build- 
ings. It was only another raid, but strategically a service- 
able one, and occurred on May 6th. Yeo, after returning 
to Kingston, soon afterwards sailed away to look up 
Chauncey at Sackett's, who was still awaiting some materials 
for the fitting out of his fleet, so he was thus able to blockade 
him. On this account the Americans had some difficulty 
in forwarding Chauncey's requirements by water, though 
closely hugging the lake shores and creek inlets. In a some- 
what rash attempt to cut some of these out of the Big 
Sandy Creek with gunboats, Yeo lost his whole party of a 
hundred and eighty men, nearly half of whom were killed 
and wounded. 

Brown was now in command at Buffalo with about five 
thousand men on the Niagara frontier. He was an active 
commander with a nice sense of discipline, and by constant 
drilling and exercise had vastly improved his division. His 
orders in July were to take Fort Erie, and thence push 
forward and seize the strong British position at Burlington, 
thus cutting off their posts on the Niagara frontier, such as 
Forts Niagara and George, from all connection with York 
and Kingston save by water, while Chauncey was expected 
to dominate the lake and co-operate with Brown. The 
posts and forces of the British on the frontier were approxi- 
mately as follows : Fort Niagara (700), Fort George (1000), 
Queenston (300), Chippewa (500), and Fort Erie (150). In 
addition to these were 1000 at York, 400 at Burlington 
heights, and a company or two at Long Point on Lake Erie. 
Riall was in command with headquarters at Fort George, 
when on July 3 the Americans crossed the river and captured 
Fort Erie, which was not seriously garrisoned but never- 
theless was of considerable value to them as a base for 
retreat. Just above the Falls of Niagara, on the British 
side, the Chippewa river, with the village and post of that 
name at its mouth, had to be crossed by the Americans 
advancing from the direction of Lake Erie. But a mile or 
two in front of this again was the smaller stream of Street's 



THE WAR IN 1814 359 

Creek. Though none of Wellington's veteran regiments had 
as yet reached the west, some had arrived in Lower Canada, 
releasing in advance the troops already stationed there. 
One battalion of the 8th was now just arriving. In addition 
to this, Riall had about five hundred of the Royal Scots 
and the 100th respectively, a squadron of the 19th Light 
Dragoons, a few artillerymen, and three light guns. Of 
militia there were three hundred of the Lincolns under 
Colonel Dickson and Major Secord, and the same number of 
Indians. With a little over two thousand men in all, Riall 
moved forward from his lines of defence on the Chippewa 
on July 5 to meet the enemy on the open half-mile strip 
between the water and the forest, which for obvious reasons 
was the distinguishing characteristic of so many battlefields 
in this war. Both forces, as elsewhere, had one flank on the 
river, the other on a wood which was occupied by their 
respective clouds of skirmishers and Indians. Generals 
Scott and Ripley led the two brigades of American regulars, 
which, with a third of volunteers and Indians, were extended 
along the line of Street's Creek, and amounted in all to about 
four thousand five hundred men. The battle thus fought 
between the two tributary streams opened with the easy 
repulse of the few British Indians in the woods to the right 
by Porter's brigade of mixed irregulars. But on the advance 
of the first British line of the Royal Scots, the 100th and 
the Lincoln militia, Porter's men fell back without loss, but 
in haste and disorder, on their main body, who had nine 
field pieces skilfully placed. The Americans, now rapidly 
acquiring under discipline and experience the qualities of 
veteran troops, encountered the attack of the smaller force 
with steadiness both in front and on their left, where Ripley 
with his brigade had in view the turning of the British 
right. The battle began about four and was hotly con- 
tested, the British, with many former fields in mind, throw- 
ing themselves with great courage again and again upon 
Scott's lines, but this time all in vain. The superior 
numbers of the Americans were now able to do themselves 



360 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

justice, and their guns played upon the British with great 
effect. As Riall was acting on the defensive, it seems some- 
thing rash to have thus abandoned the line of the Chippewa 
and attacked the Americans with such advantage at any 
rate as their smaller stream gave them. When Riall drew 
off his men, though in good order, to his own lines behind 
the Chippewa, and then repulsed an attempt to cross it, the 
battle was over, and he had lost a fourth of his small army, 
but practically no prisoners. The ist Royal Scots lost 
nearly half their strength, as did also the iooth. The 
militia fought bravely and suffered considerably, but the 
8th were only slightly engaged. The Americans, who only 
lost about three hundred and fifty men, claimed a victory. 
It seems too that their calculations did not include Porter's 
brigade driven off early in the fight, nor yet Ripley's, which, 
attempting a flanking movement in the woods, was not 
much engaged, but for this very reason held the 8th Regi- 
ment also out of action, though this gallant corps was 
enumerated as being in the thick of it. This, however, does 
not much matter. Riall attacked, partially justified to be 
sure by recent tradition and experience, when he was lead- 
ing a campaign of defence, and was repulsed to the lines 
he had to defend, losing more men than he could afford. 
This was the sum-total of the battle. But with scarcely any 
artillery, and the Chippewa indefensible higher up, and his 
force greatly reduced, he now retired from his lines, and on 
the 8th reached Fort George, where he was met by eight 
hundred Glengarries and U.E. militia. Leaving his wounded 
and some of his men here he started for Burlington heights 
to unite with the 104th and flank companies of the 103rd, 
who held that post. Brown meant well, but he could not 
control the New York militia either in the face of the foe or 
when a defenceless country was to be ravaged. The frontier 
was now again exposed to these gentry, and Colonel Stone 
of their service burned the village of St. Davids, for which 
Brown cashiered him. ' My God ! ' writes an American 
officer who was killed at Lundy's Lane at the head of his 



THE WAR IN 1814 361 

regiment the next day, ' what a service ! I have never 
witnessed such a scene. If their commanding officer had 
not been disgraced and sent out of the army I should have 
handed in my sheepskin.' 

Brown pressed on to Queenston, doubtful whether to 
attack Fort George or follow Riall on his way to Burlington. 
He now learned that the latter was reinforced and lying at 
Fifteen Mile Creek but a dozen miles away. And more 
important still, that Chauncey, on whose fleet he counted, 
had failed him ; another case of jealousy, but apparently of 
a 'service' rather than a personal nature, with the merits 
of which, and the acrid correspondence that discussed them, 
we are not concerned. It is enough that while a council 
of war were considering whether they should invest Fort 
George or attack Riall, they were suddenly apprised of the 
fact that the latter was at Queenston. Brown at once 
retreated to the south bank of the Chippewa, while Riall's 
van almost immediately afterwards, following on the same 
road along the Niagara river to the Falls, halted somewhat 
more than a mile short of them upon some rising ground, 
across which, and at right angles to the river, ran the in- 
significant but historic byway known as Lundy's Lane. 
This point was reached on the morning of July 25th, and in 
position there were the Glengarry Regiment, a company of 
the 104th, five hundred local militia, and a few dragoons 
and artillerymen, just under one thousand in all. The main 
body, somewhat more numerous, through some mistake did 
not arrive till after sunset, when the battle was half over. 
A third division of eight hundred men under General 
Drummond had been hastily brought across the lake from 
York and, marching independently, arrived just in time to 
turn a retreat into a battle. Brown, though only three 
miles away, had not discovered the advance of the British 
to Lundy's Lane till noon, and it was late in the afternoon 
when he sent Scott with his brigade to feel the force of the 
enemy. Riall, with nothing but his first division and the 
whole of the American army before him, ordered Colonel 



362 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

Pearson to retire. Soon afterwards, however, Drummond 
came up, counter-ordered the movement, and with about 
seventeen hundred men in all, formed his line of battle to 
meet the enemy, who were close at hand. Drummond had 
with him the 89th, the 8th, and detachments of the 1st and 
41st, and among them Colonel Morrison, who had won the 
fight at Chrystler's farm. Winfield Scott had thirteen 
hundred men in his own division and attacked the low 
ridge held by the British an hour before Ripley's brigade of 
regulars, sixteen hundred strong, and Porter's volunteers of 
thirteen hundred, arrived. The attack was vigorously 
delivered mainly on the British centre, and with a view 
to turning their left in a gap above the seething waters of 
the Niagara river, just below the Falls, that Drummond's 
extended line could not cover. Scott was repulsed, but the 
slender British force could not venture to follow up any 
advantage with the two other American brigades only now 
coming into action, and their own third division marching 
from Queenston at a quite doubtful distance. At half-past 
seven the rest of the American army joined issue, making a 
total of over four thousand, and the British were heavily 
pressed, their left above the Niagara cliffs being once 
actually turned, and the 8th and the militia stationed there 
being driven back over the Queenston road. But re-forming 
behind the main body they returned to the attack and 
recovered the position, though at this point General Riali 
was wounded and captured. The seven British guns on the 
top of the ridge, which were doing great execution, and 
were covered by the 89th and detachments of the Royal 
Scots and 41st, now became Brown's principal object, and 
he sent that excellent officer, Colonel Miller, with seven 
hundred men of various battalions against them. It was 
now almost dark, and as Miller's men advanced against the 
guns one of his regiments received such a hot fire and sub- 
sequent bayonet charge that it broke utterly. In the con- 
fusion and darkness, however, and with much adroitness, 
Miller led the rest of his men undiscovered up to a brush- 



THE WAR IN 1814 363 

grown rail fence close to the muzzles of the British guns. 
From thence they poured in a discharge that killed and 
wounded every gunner and rushed in on the battery, which 
was out of action for the rest of the fight, though owing to 
the staunchness of the infantry on the ridge the Americans 
never succeeded in getting away with the guns. Soon 
after nine the third British corps, some thirteen hundred 
strong, under Colonel Hercules Scott, the victims of much 
futile marching and counter-marching for the whole of a 
hot day, reached the field, now shrouded in moonless night, 
illumined only by the flare of the musketry. These weary 
newcomers consisted of the 103rd, 104th, some more of the 
Royal Scots and 8th, with three hundred militia and a 
couple of guns. Part of this force in the turmoil and dark- 
ness ran unawares right into the American centre, now on 
the top of the hill, and were repulsed in confusion by a 
withering fire. The Americans now held the hill and the 
British position along most of the line, and Drummond 
re-forming his troops, with the new arrivals now recovered 
from their rough reception in the second line, made a 
vigorous attempt to regain it, which was entirely successful. 
But for nearly three hours of that July night the battle 
raged furiously along the very ridge where two hours 
before sunset the combatants had first joined issue. The 
Americans, unlike the British, had come into the fight fresh, 
but were now suffering from excessive thirst, to which their 
people, then as now incessant water drinkers, were more 
liable than the European in similar emergencies. About 
midnight Brown drew off his whole force, leaving his dead 
and badly wounded behind, the British in the position they 
had taken up in the morning and the guns still on the hill. 
Such was the battle of Lundy's Lane, the most fiercely 
contested of any in this war. The loss of the British was 
nearly a third of those engaged, that of the Americans 
nearly a fourth of their larger force, and one may wonder 
how many of the countless visitors to Niagara Falls remem- 
ber that the bones of several hundred men killed in a famous 



364 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

battle, fought in great part by the light of its own gun fire, 
mingle with the dust about their feet. The 89th Regiment 
lost much more than half its numbers, the Royal Scots in 
the two battles of Chippewa and Lundy's Lane four hundred, 
and the active militia about half of those engaged. Their 
colonel, Robinson, was badly wounded, while General 
Drummond himself was severely wounded, but kept his 
post. So also was Morrison, and Riall, as already men- 
tioned, was captured as he was proceeding wounded to the 
left rear. On the American side Generals Brown and 
Winfield Scott were both severely wounded. Ripley, next 
in command, had orders to attack the British on the follow- 
ing morning, a venture one can well understand his men 
were in no condition to attempt. But instead of this he 
burnt the bridge over the Chippewa, flung a portion of his 
stores and tents into the Niagara river, and retreated to 
Fort Erie with Drummond's light troops on his heels. 
Lundy's Lane was a desperate hand-to-hand encounter, in 
which both sides fought till they were exhausted and left 
off where they began. Strategically, 01 course, the sole 
advantage was with the British. The Americans were try- 
ing to drive them out of western Canada, and failing at 
Lundy's Lane to break through Drummond's defence, 
retired somewhat precipitately, destroying at the same 
time much of their stores, to Fort Erie, and were virtually 
besieged there at the edge of the country for the rest of the 
season. Some American historians claim Lundy's Lane 
as a victory. If so, an invaded nation might pray for a long 
series of such defeats. Canadian writers, on the other 
hand, speak of the 'flight of the American army from the 
field to Fort Erie.' Ripley's retreat on the next day was per- 
haps superfluously undignified, but to describe it as a flight 
is certainly an exuberance of patriotism. The Americans 
failed in their object undoubtedly, but the actual fight was 
unquestionably a drawn one, and it seems a pity to mar an 
incident replete with dogged valour and endurance on the 
part of the soldiers, both the American regulars and the 



THE WAR IN 1814 365 

British of all arms, by patently absurd statements on the 
one hand and rather ungenerous and misleading phraseology 
on the other. Seldom have British infantry, on the top 
too of an exhausting day's march in a hot sun, shown their 
great qualities more conspicuously than on that black July 
night within reach of the very spray of Niagara. The U.E. 
militia too, not merely the incorporated but the sedentary 
companies, who returned after the battle to their ripening 
harvest fields, fought with equal staunchness, rallying when 
hard pressed with the coolness of regulars around the 
regimental colours planted along that stubbornly-contested 
and firelit ridge. Within sight of the lofty shaft on Queens- 
ton heights, commemorating a noble soldier and the repulse 
of the first attempt at invasion, there rises on the lower 
ridge of Lundy's Lane a humbler obelisk in memory of what 
may be called the last attempt and the stubborn infantry, 
British and Canadian, who fell in defeating it. For the rest 
of the season Drummond was more or less investing Fort 
Erie, and on August 15 he made a desperate assault on its 
now large and formidable works, a night attack delivered 
at three points. It was no surprise, for every attempt was 
received with a deadly fire, and the defenders were more 
numerous than the attacking party. On this night too the 
de Watteville Regiment, hitherto steady, stampeded, carrying 
with them the 8th. Deprived of their flints, so that the 
bayonet alone might be used, and with scaling-ladders which 
proved much too short, they were severely tried. The left of 
the works, which were half a mile in length, was attacked by 
Colonel Hercules Scott and his regiment, the 103rd, who 
were received with withering volleys of musketry and grape 
which killed Scott and knocked over a third of his men. 

In the centre under Colonel Drummond a small force, 
mainly of the 104th, joined by a number of Scott's baffled 
men of the 103rd, performed one of the most heroic deeds 
of the war, but most disastrous in its effect. After three 
or four determined efforts against the abatis in the teeth 
of the fire of sheltered riflemen innumerable, they won a 



366 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

bastion and held it, neither could the repeated and desperate 
attacks nor the hottest fire of the enemy dislodge those 
intrepid men. General Gaines had succeeded Brown, who 
was laid up with his wounds, and appears from the style of 
his despatches to have been a belated specimen of the 
Jeffersonian Democrat politician once more in the field. 
He writes to his government of the approach of the British 
on this night as being 'enveloped in darkness, black as 
their designs and principles.' No soldier, certainly none 
occupying his neighbour's territory, could have written such 
stuff as this. 

Nothing, however, could dislodge the British from the 
captured bastion, when Gaines seems to have been informed 
by an officer that there was a store of powder under it, and 
that he could blow them to pieces in a moment. The 
suggestion was promptly and perhaps legitimately adopted 
by the virtuous general, and with a terrific explosion three 
or four hundred gallant soldiers with the masonry of the 
bastion were blown high into the air. This may not have 
been out of accord with the most illuminating principles, 
but it was extremely characteristic that the successful Guy 
Fawkes should sit down and write to the Washington 
Government that the bastion 'was carried at the point 
of the bayonet with dreadful slaughter.' The explosion 
put an end to everything, for some four hundred or five 
hundred British soldiers were either killed or wounded by it. 
The total casualties of the attacking force amounted in 
consequence to something like nine hundred, one or two 
regiments being almost destroyed. Several incidents took 
place during the autumn, and the Americans made an attack 
in force on Drummond's lines, which after a loss of several 
hundreds on both sides was repulsed. Izard too came up 
and replaced the unctuous and unveracious despatch-writing 
Gaines, who was wounded while actually seated at his 
desk wielding the eloquent but erring pen, which really 
does seem a quite remarkable instance of retributive justice. 

Two Peninsular regiments now came up to Drummond, 



THE WAR IN 1814 367 

and though Izard had eight thousand men at Fort Erie, 
the fact of Yeo having again wrested the command of Lake 
Ontario from Chauncey made the American general hesi- 
tate to press on into Canada until the time for winter 
quarters had arrived. Several small raids were made ; Port 
Dover and Port Talbot on Lake Erie, peaceful villages, 
were burnt and ravaged by filibustering parties, while 
Colonel M'Arthur from Detroit with seven hundred Ken- 
tucky horsemen, made a much more serious one in late 
October through the heart of the peninsula as far as 
Burford. But on the approach of the 103rd Regiment he 
retraced his steps, having been three weeks in the country 
and done a great deal of damage by fire and requisition on 
property, and left a further instalment of bitter memories 
to be hugged by Canadian firesides. Fort Erie was dis- 
mantled and evacuated by Izard's army at the beginning of 
November, and with his departure we also may leave Upper 
Canada, now clear once more of all enemies. After three 
campaigns it was still intact though much ravaged, and 
more pronounced than ever in its political convictions which 
henceforward its people were left in peace to cultivate. 
Nor can I do more than repeat here that the north-western 
post of Michillimackinac was captured by the British early 
in the war ; and add that a thousand disorderly men, with 
the unopposed American fleet on the western waters at their 
disposal, vainly attempted its recapture but did a little 
profitable plundering among the few traders' stores at the 
Sault Ste. Marie and elsewhere. So the famous old post, 
even then still far into the wilderness and the scene for so 
many generations of romantic combats by land and sea 
between various races, remained with the British to hand 
back again at the peace. Commodore Chauncey and Sir 
James Yeo had alternately held the supremacy of Lake 
Ontario, an advantage depending mainly on the activity 
which they respectively showed in the building of the 
quickly constructed short-lived little war-ships that so 
vitally influenced the land operations. 



368 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

And now it only remains to say something of the last 
year's fighting, or rather inglorious campaigning, in eastern 
Canada, where the luckless Prevost with the finest troops 
that probably ever set foot upon American soil contrived 
something approaching disgrace, and to sully at its close 
the three years' glorious defence of Canada. To those 
who have followed through these three chapters the tough 
struggles of little handfuls of men and of battles, decided 
sometimes by a single regiment at half strength, the hearing 
that 16,000 of Wellington's veterans had now landed in 
Canada will cause something like a start. Two regiments, 
as we know, went up to Drummond in the autumn, but 
most of these troops were in the neighbourhood of Kingston 
and Montreal, and unfortunately for every one but the 
Americans, were under Prevost's immediate command. 
Though as regards despatches the Governor had the ear of 
the Home Government, other tongues and other pens had 
by this time been busy enough with his military incapacity, 
his utter want of nerve, and the obstinacy that often marks 
the timid man. So it had been politely but forcibly 
intimated that these choice troops who had won battles and 
sieges innumerable and fought and marched for years 
through Spain and France were not sent out for the purpose 
of making futile demonstrations. They were meant to strike 
with; in other words, that Prevost must now accomplish some- 
thing definite. So the invasion of New York State by the 
old Champlain route was decided upon. Perhaps Prevost 
was ahead of his age ; at any rate his reliance on sea power 
as represented by the lakes was almost an obsession, 
tender as he had been of his enemy's naval resources at 
Sackett's Harbour. Plattsburg on the west shore of Lake 
Champlain, and twenty-five miles over the border-line, 
was the first objective point, redolent as it was of the 
memories of Hampton and Wilkinson and their perform- 
ances, which Prevost was to emulate. The east shore of 
the lake was to be avoided, as it was in the State of 
Vermont, whose heart was not in the war, and who had in 



THE WAR IN 1814 369 

fact been doing a roaring trade in beef and flour with the 
British army all through it. There was now a weak British 
flotilla on the Lake with a big ship not yet quite fit for 
sea, and Captain Dowie was sent by Yeo to take charge 
of this little fleet which was lying at Isle-aux-Motte in the 
Richelieu river. Prevost, with de Rottenburgh as second 
in command, picked up his troops quartered for the most 
part on the old camping and fighting ground between 
Montreal and the head of Lake Champlain, and marched 
toward Plattsburg with 11,000 of perhaps the best soldiers 
at that moment in the world ; men not accustomed merely 
to summer campaigns in Flanders, but who had faced every 
vicissitude of heat and cold and every physical obstacle 
that nature could confront them with, to say nothing of 
Napoleon's soldiers, and to whom the now half-cleared 
American forest of this district in the pleasant season of 
early autumn must have seemed almost a holiday country. 
Izard with his army had recently left Plattsburg, and as 
we know had reinforced Fort Erie. There was now nothing 
there but a trifle of fifteen hundred regulars under a good 
soldier, Macombe, and behind admirable defences, together 
with a mob of militia hastily gathered from the surrounding 
country. As Prevost advanced with prodigious delibera- 
tion along good roads, Macombe made more than one 
attempt to check him. His militia, he says himself, ran at 
the sight of the British, who ' did not deign to fire on them 
except by their patrols.' Major Wool, whom we have 
met before, handled some guns with admirable effect, but 
so undaunted by it, says Macombe again, were the British 
veterans that they never even deployed but pressed on in 
columns. When the Americans had concentrated in Platts- 
burg and Prevost had sat down within a mile of it, 
Macombe was working very hard at his defences, which lay 
on a ridge but need not be described as they were never 
attacked, while behind them, as before mentioned, were 
fifteen hundred regulars and about two thousand militia. 
Had Drummond been there with the comparatively feeble 

2 A 



370 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

force by which he held Brown, Gaimes and Izard at Fort 
Erie, he would have attacked Plattsburg without hesitation. 
Prevost could have walked over it. But he was obsessed of 
' naval co-operation,' admirable on normal occasions but 
with this man a kind of fetish. He must also have been, 
like many of his kind, invincible against remonstrance. 
There was a small American fleet in Plattsburg harbour 
and a rather smaller British one higher up the lake, as we 
know, under Dowie. So Prevost arranged with the latter 
to come down and fight the enemy's fleet in the harbour 
while he attacked the intrenchments. Dowie's largest ship 
was not quite ready, so Prevost kept his 11,000 veterans 
marking time for five days before a task that one of his 
generals of world-wide experience assured him would take 
about twenty minutes, while the Americans, though nothing 
could have saved them had another officer been in Prevost's 
place, could at any rate put in five more days' work 
on their fortifications. At length Dowie had his flag- 
ship ready and gallantly sailed down the lake, entered the 
difficult harbour, and engaged the somewhat superior arma- 
ment within it with the result that he was beaten after a 
stubborn fight, being himself killed at the beginning of it, 
which may have influenced the result. The shape of the 
harbour, the disposition made by Macdonough, the American 
commodore within it, and the direction of the wind at the 
time, put Dowie at an immense disadvantage. But Prevost 
after opening his batteries in half-hearted style on the 
enemy, gave in at once when the result of the naval en- 
gagement, which he had not even concurrently supported, 
was evident. Incredible as it seems, he at once ordered a 
retreat. His generals and his colonels protested, but 
protests from old soldiers never had affected Prevost. 
( Naval co-operation ' was at an end ; that was enough for 
him. It is not denied, if the expression is allowable, that 
it would have been child's play for these superb troops to 
have carried intrenchments held by one-seventh of their 
number of soldiers and a mob of militia. From these, if 



THE WAR IN 1814 37i 

captured before the sea-fight, Prevost could have driven 
the American fleet to fight in open water, or attacking 
after the naval engagement could have recovered the 
crippled British ships as well as the cripples of the enemy. 
It was supposed at the time that Macombe merely contem- 
plated a brief show of resistance had Prevost attacked, nor 
would such a course under the circumstances have been 
any discredit to him. No one in his army, it is said, was 
more amazed, and naturally no one so delighted. 

So Prevost, having first destroyed a quantity of his own 
stores, marched his Peninsular veterans back to Montreal. 
There appears to have been an unusual amount of desertion 
on the return journey, and one can well believe that the 
men who had chased the French across the Pyrenees 
reflected that working on a farm was better entertainment, 
and not less glorious, than following such a general as they 
had discovered in Canada. The officers must almost have 
regretted that they too could not desert. The total 
casualties of Prevost's advance division in approaching 
their position before Plattsburg from cannon and rifle fire, 
which Macombe, it will be remembered, said they scorned to 
recognise by deploying, was about a hundred and eighty ; 
the bulk of the force was not even engaged. The jubilation 
which succeeded to the astonishment of the Americans was 
very natural. Prevost wrote home that just as his troops 
were in the very act of storming the Plattsburg lines ' he 
had the mortification to hear the shouts of victory announc- 
ing the defeat of the flotilla in the harbour,' and that 
without the co-operation of the vessels it would have been 
useless to go further. The next summer a naval court- 
martial was held on the little sea fight, which found that 
the fleet had been lured to destruction by an unfulfilled 
promise of land co-operation. This brought a summons to 
Prevost to come home and give an account of himself, at 
which, being a man quite without guile but assuredly pos- 
sessed of a vein of obtuseness or self-complacency, he 
seems to have been surprised and hurt. Indeed so much 



372 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

so that his health, injured by an overland journey in winter 
to Halifax, broke down under the suspense of a deferred 
court-martial, and he died in England about a year later, at 
the early age of forty-eight. He was a quite blameless and 
well-meaning man in the ordinary affairs of life, very 
amiable and popular with the French Canadians, who by 
comparison felt the strain of war nowise, prices being good 
and money plentiful. Most of those who served actively 
were regular soldiers in Government pay, while their province 
remained intact. Prevost's nice behaviour to them, and his 
excellent French accent, were useful assets in the back- 
ground, and in a minor sense were of value to the defence 
of the country, while his hopeless inefficiency in the face of 
an enemy did not worry a community who, unlike the Upper 
Canadians, were enjoying the advantages rather than the 
terrors of war, not from any disinclination to take their 
share, but simply because war did not come their way. 
There is no evidence that Prevost failed in his more passive 
duties connected with the war, such as finding the ways and 
means for carrying it on, which was not easy, though 
Canadian historians blame him for laxity in shipbuilding 
in spite of the maritime obsession which signalised his final 
fiasco. But he is remembered as a man possessed of 
an amazing tenderness for the feelings of an enemy who 
were themselves somewhat truculent ; who made superfluous 
truces to suit their views which were avowedly aggressive ; 
who watched with complacency an enemy's fleet building 
in Sackett's Harbour, and subsequently, when he himself 
attacked, withdrew his forces as they were in the very act of 
striking the final blow. He is remembered as the general 
who ordered the evacuation of the whole peninsula of Upper 
Canada at a critical moment, an order happily and deliber- 
ately disobeyed by his subordinates, and who later on 
urged a second attack on Fort Erie to the enterprising fire- 
eating Drummond, who regarded it as too desperate, and was 
justified by its later evacuation. Above all he is remem- 
bered as the man who disgraced Wellington's veterans and 



THE WAR IN 1814 373 

spoilt the finish, so far as Canada was concerned, of a 
struggle in which it is no exaggeration, no mere redundancy 
of patriotism, to say that nearly all concerned actively in its 
defence till that moment had covered themselves with glory. 
This is not a history of the war. In three chapters it is 
only possible to give its salient points, enough to show what 
services were performed for three trying years by a handful 
of British and Canadian regulars of both races aided by a 
U.E. militia, who in no instance that I can find flinched or 
failed, and in a less degree by that of the French, for the 
simple fact that they lay adjacent to the quasi-friendly 
American States, and were not attacked. There was prac- 
tically none of the spirit of 1775-6, or of the years of the 
French Revolution, or again of the disaffection which, if 
partial, was conspicuous at a much later date. It is true 
that their Quebec politicians, with the enemy not far from 
their gates, excited themselves over matters that most 
small countries in imminent peril of their existence usually 
defer till a more appropriate period. This may perhaps be 
attributed in part to the flapping of immature and half- 
fledged political wings, and to the fact that the politicians 
were quite safe. The sedentary militia, both of Quebec and 
Montreal, showed every readiness to do their part should 
the occasion arise, and though the former never had a 
moment's anxiety, the latter had reason to give practical 
evidence of its undoubted ardour. A last word on Prevost 
may record the fact that great efforts, in view of the fact 
that death robbed him of the opportunity to defend himself, 
were made in behalf of his memory by his relations, and a 
monument erected to him in Winchester Cathedral. But the 
man who enjoys the lustre of conspicuous public position 
must stand or fall in his public character by the judgment 
of history, and not least by that of the people he governed 
even though they be three thousand miles away. It would 
be not unfair to say that Canada was saved in spite of 
Prevost, honestly zealous as he was to save Canada, though 
not always quite honest in his despatches, for the very shifts 



374 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

the poor man must have been sometimes put to in explain- 
ing away his military vagaries. And as an historical per- 
sonage of considerable fortuitous importance in North 
America he cannot be appraised, in spite of the eulogy at 
Winchester, on the principle of De mortuis nil nisi bonum. 
As I have considered it no part of my business here to 
describe the naval duels in the Atlantic between British 
and American frigates, that American historians very natur- 
ally dwell on at greater length and with more satisfaction 
than they do upon the events with which we have been con- 
cerned in the current chapters, so I need do no more than 
mention the British expedition to the Chesapeake, which 
took place at the end of this year 1814. English historians 
have followed suit, knowing, one may venture to say without 
offence, scarcely anything of this war, and dwelt upon these 
isolated sea fights, which, though admirable exhibitions of 
courage and seamanship, meant little, and had small effect 
on the war, to the exclusion of the far more vital conflict on 
Canadian soil that meant everything. The British expedi- 
tion under General Ross was directed against the South 
for reasons of equity as much as of military strategy. 
New England, though one or two small naval expeditions 
were sent against the coast of Maine, had now carried her 
denunciations of the war to serious threats of secession, and 
it was only just that Great Britain should strike against 
those who challenged her rather than those who had shown 
a stedfast aversion to picking a quarrel. The opportunity 
was given to the bellicose souls of Virginia and Maryland 
to flesh their swords and to President Madison to have a 
personal taste of the war he had helped to create. Ross's 
four thousand men, however, walked very easily through 
the defenders of Washington, scattered the government as 
well as their troops, and with much deliberation, as a return 
for the destruction of the government buildings of Upper 
Canada, burnt those at Washington to the ground. There 
was a tremendous outcry. Jefferson and Madison called all 
ancient and modern history, after the curious and portentous 



THE WAR IN 1814 375 

bombast of their day and type, to parallel so heinous a 
crime. Both of them knew perfectly well, and could not 
pretend to deny, that their people had meted out precisely 
the same treatment and a great deal more of it and with 
equal deliberation to the poor Canadians, while at that very 
moment M'Arthur was burning and robbing an unresist- 
ing yeomanry through seventy miles of Upper Canada. It 
would not indeed be worth dwelling upon the matter but 
for the fact that English historians, even such as Green, 
follow suit for the simple reason that the details of the 
Canadian war of 1812 are quite obviously altogether outside 
their purview. Three years of arduous fighting, distin- 
guished by many heroic deeds on the part of the British and 
Canadian soldiers, and resulting in the preservation of Canada 
to the Crown, does not somehow seem so contemptible a 
passage in British history as this indifference would indi- 
cate ! But the wanton burning of York and Newark and of 
many inglorious but hardly won and laboriously created 
villages and farms had been perpetrated long before the 
torch was applied to the public buildings at Washington, 
not merely as an answer but as a warning, and it served 
that purpose for the brief period of conflict that still re- 
mained for the Canadian frontier. English historians as a 
rule know little of all this, and echo the cry of wanton 
vandalism raised by the earlier American writers, who did 
know better, but for reasons of their own omitted the 
context. In this autumn too Sir John Sherbrooke, Governor 
of Nova Scotia, had led a small expedition to the mouth of 
the Penobscot in Maine, with a view of annexing that 
wedge of country between the Penobscot river and New 
Brunswick which geographically belongs to Canada. He 
met with but a slight and half-hearted resistance, the people 
being doubtless indifferent. He left a garrison there till 
the end of the war, when by the treaty all conquests were 
returned. It is a pity for all reasons that this wedge of 
country was not retained, as it created the Maine boundary 
question, and to this day is an eyesore on the map to the 



376 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

patriotic Canadian, and obviously out of focus to any eye. 
By the close of 1814 both sides were sick of war. The 
British government and people had never of course pro- 
fessed the slighest enthusiasm for it. How could they with 
all Europe on their hands and minds ? The northern 
States, as we have seen, were constantly threatening seces- 
sion, the burden of a war which they did not want having 
fallen most heavily upon them and their commerce. The 
war-hawks had reaped no glory. Such as there was had 
been gathered on the water, an element with which they 
had little to do, while general after general had gone 
home from the Canadian border on ' long leave.' The 
militia with rare exceptions had nearly always failed in front 
of the enemy. The regular army had, to be sure, gained 
much experience, but an experience of no use whatever to a 
country entering upon a peace of over thirty years. The 
defence of New Orleans by General Jackson was almost 
the only bright spot in the military record, and this 
occurred early in 181 5, after the peace preliminaries had 
been signed at Ghent between the two Powers on the day 
before Christmas 18 14. The war party in America, re- 
presenting to a large extent the more ignorant and excit- 
able half of the country, had cherished the idea in the 
plantations and in the backwoods that Napoleon was in- 
vincible, and entered upon the struggle with a light heart 
as his ally, in opposition to what they had persuaded them- 
selves was a decaying nation. Pluckily as their own small 
navy had fought, they were practically cut off from the 
world. They could now neither buy nor sell and were 
face to face with ruin. They were virtually blockaded 
from Florida to Maine, while the southern people on the 
coast had been kept in a constant state of alarm by the 
menacing behaviour of small war parties sent here and there 
to divert some of the troops destined for Canada. Jefferson's 
confident and unsophisticated back-country friends had 
learned something of 'sea power/ and were now quite as 
ready as any for peace. Great Britain had suffered, however, 



THE WAR IN 1814 377 

a great deal from American privateers and still more from 
the loss of her American trade, and all this was only a heavy 
addition to the sacrifices she had made, and as it turned out 
had not quite done with, in her resistance to Napoleon. 
The peninsula of Upper Canada had suffered grievously 
from the legitimate horrors of war, and much more from 
the ruthless and irresponsible raider. But that region, 
after all, was then but a small fraction of the British North 
American provinces. These upon the whole had profited 
in every way, in military reputation, in self-confidence and 
even in trade, by the war. Above all, the latter definitely 
settled the question of the ' fourteenth State.' Canada, both 
French and English, had given a decisive answer. However 
they might quarrel among themselves, the war had made a 
breach that gave Upper Canada over wholly to the U.E. 
influence, which in truth had needed no such conflict as 
this to perpetuate its principles. To the mass of Upper 
Canadians of hitherto indifferent or wavering opinions it 
put American prepossessions out of the question either as a 
matter of personal conviction or as a thing any longer to 
be tolerated in the expression. The French Canadians, 
whose previous and partial fraternisation with the Ameri- 
cans had of course been artificial and, unlike the other, 
without any national and racial affinities, had shared in the 
very real military triumph which Canada could boast of. 
They had already as regards their intelligent classes long 
done with France politically and for obvious reasons, while 
the parishes could never again be the happy hunting-ground 
of the American propagandist. 



378 THE MAKING OF CANADA 



CHAPTER XV 

CONCLUSION 

The treaty of peace virtually restored matters between 
the two countries to the status quo. The conquest of 
Canada had been a leading object of one party to the 
struggle, its preservation the sole object of the other. The 
aim of the first had been utterly frustrated, that of the 
second had been entirely successful. The principles for 
which the war had been ostensibly waged by the Americans 
as regards the Orders in Council, had been, it will be 
remembered, conceded by Great Britain just before the first 
shot was fired. As to the right of search for deserters on 
the high seas which was tenaciously adhered to by the 
British, it was virtually ignored at the treaty. As a 
matter of fact, however, the times had wholly changed. 
Peace had fallen on a war-weary world and Napoleon was 
thought to be permanently out of mischief at Elba. Friction 
on the ocean had automatically ceased, and the American 
Government was not prepared to prolong a ruinous war for 
principles that were not likely to be put to the test in their 
time. Every one, in short, was only too relieved by what 
seemed a real and lasting peace. When in the same spring 
Napoleon burst again upon the world for those memorable 
' Hundred days ' that terminated with Waterloo, the fact of 
the American war forces itself incidentally for the moment 
on the thousand readers so familiar with the greater 
struggle, for the cream of Wellington's infantry at this 
crucial moment was in Canada. Every one knows too that 
the British army at Waterloo was of very uneven quality, 



CONCLUSION 379 

and contained an unusually large element of recruits and 
militiamen, a fact which has always given its performance 
upon that immortal day exceptional significance. So no 
one will need more than reminding that it was the recent 
defence of Canada that created Wellington's chief difficulty 
before Waterloo. For a not greatly inferior force numerically 
to that which filled the British squares at Waterloo, and of 
higher average quality, had been recently marched away by 
Prevost from a trumpery and feebly-manned intrenchment 
on Lake Champlain and were now kicking their heels on 
the banks of the St. Lawrence or in mid-ocean homeward 
bound. 

With that most significant of all years, that most luminous 
of all dates perhaps in recent history, 1815, Canada too 
winds up an epoch. Hitherto her story has been generally 
an eventful, sometimes a dramatic one, and always more or 
less concerned with the great events then going forward in 
he world. Indeed it is on this account I have ventured to 
solicit for it the interest of outside readers. Henceforward 
it is an wholly domestic tale, interesting mainly to those 
curious in constitutional questions and experiments, or in 
colonial progress. Two clearly marked stages in Canada's 
progress towards political salvation, each covering about a 
quarter of a century, followed the war, and both were in a 
sense political failures. The first wound up in partial and 
simultaneous rebellion in both provinces, due in the one to 
the indiscreet pretensions of an oligarchy and in the other 
to something resembling this, further complicated by racial 
bitterness. This epoch was closed by Lord Durham's 
advent and famous report in 1838-9. The two provinces 
were now united in a single Parliament, which scheme also 
proved a failure, till in 1867 came the great work of Federa- 
tion which in a different sense from that implied by the 
title of this book might also be truly called the making of 
Canada. 

The most pronounced social and political feature, how- 
ever, that followed the war in Upper Canada was the con- 



380 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

solidating of all power in the hands of a class, represented 
or at least led by a group of families and hence known as 
' The Family Compact' As we have seen, this movement 
actually arose before the war from the peculiar composition 
and antecedents of the U.E. settlers and the physical con- 
ditions of the country. As the better sort of this body 
regarded themselves as the peculiar heirs of Upper Canada 
and entitled to a chief share, not only in directing its 
destinies but in such good things as the increasing require- 
ments of the province made available, so the war served to 
accentuate their position and even increase their sense of 
proprietorship. For they and their followers had naturally 
played the most prominent part in it of all the local elements, 
and formed the bulk of the militia regiments that fought 
through it so staunchly. The mass of the later immigrants 
from the States, their feelings not being deeply involved 
either way, took a comparatively small share in the defence 
but represented among them no doubt every variety of 
attitude and opinion according to circumstances and the 
course of the war. 

The others, however, had been passionately in earnest, for 
obvious reasons. And at the close of the war their leaders, 
together with all their connection, considered that they had 
further title both to the gratitude of Great Britain and to 
the best things of the great province they had been the first 
to settle and the foremost of its people to fight for. Further- 
more, they represented the bulk of its educated class. They 
came out of the war more intensely British and anti- 
republican than ever. A small oligarchy, already in the 
making out of this class, consolidated itself after the peace 
and virtually ruled Upper Canada, as well as most of its 
successive governors till it provoked rebellion, and indeed 
its members retained considerable prestige, sometimes 
well earned, till the period of Federation in 1867 or even 
later. The Family Compact, a borrowed phrase not strictly 
applicable, is indeed the leading note in Upper Canadian 
history from the war till the political union of the province 



CONCLUSION 381 

with its French neighbour. It is a somewhat picturesque 
situation this small aristocracy, based very literally in the 
main on its military service to the Crown, planted in a 
crude new country and withstanding the popular instincts 
of a democratic freeholding yeomanry for nearly two 
generations. For this, as was shown when dealing with its 
inception, was no territorial aristocracy, such as had existed 
in a modified form in the American provinces and even yet 
existed in a still more modified one. Canadian land was 
a useless instrument for political or social power. It was 
inadaptable to anything of the kind, and these people had 
very early recognised its futility. They were judges, 
lawyers, bankers, doctors, and above all office-holders ; for 
they kept a tight grip on the emoluments of the province. 
They lived in Toronto, Kingston, and a few smaller towns 
which they made extremely pleasant places of abode, and 
where a certain simplicity of life, for incomes and fortunes 
were small, was combined with a general air of good breed- 
ing. Their attitude was aristocratic, and a contempt for the 
populace who were clearing the forests and conducting its 
minor trades was at any rate a leading indictment against 
them in the long struggle for power made by the growing 
popular party. In a sense they were more truly aristocrats 
than the old families in the American provinces from whom 
many of them sprang, for their claims to precedence were 
largely based on military service to the King and the de- 
votion of two generations through two long and sanguinary 
wars. The ingredients of the Family Compact were not 
literally confined to those who had such claims, and a part 
of the U.E. rank and file were in the other camp, but it was 
of such that the nucleus was composed. As the tone was 
largely social, it will be readily understood that other 
elements in sympathy with class distinctions as opposed to 
democratic influences, retired officers from Great Britain 
and their equivalents, were gathered within the fold, sup- 
porting and sometimes sharing in its influence. Successive 
governors with their entourage, and British garrisons 



382 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

quartered in the country, had natural affinities with a caste 
who, if they monopolised the offices, also monopolised most 
of the graces to be found in a new country. History 
denounces them as arrogant and intolerant. They were 
certainly out of touch with that democratic note that the 
retrospective modern looks for in a young and struggling 
country. But they and their fathers had lived through 
stirring times that are not easy for the modern voter or 
politicain in a latter-day oversea community to realise 
without an effort of imagination that he may sometimes be 
incapable of making. Democracy to them was the parent 
of all evil. The United States was from their point of view 
an abiding example of its anarchic principles. They were 
human too, and self-interest was strong within them, and 
that they overdid their part is beyond question. They 
fought the growing opposition in the elective assembly with 
the formidable weapons which at that day the control of the 
Governor, the Executive, the Council, the justiciary and 
practically all the offices made possible, though not without 
a good many dramatic incidents and the making of a good 
many popular martyrs. They became so exclusive that 
even educated and well-endorsed Englishmen not seldom 
found the gates of a career in the higher walks of life closed 
against them, sometimes to become themselves leaders in 
the popular opposition and sometimes to publish for British 
readers trenchant accounts of the parlous state of the 
Canadian body politic. Occasionally even appointments 
made by the British Government itself were flouted. 

In the face of a democracy growing by leaps and bounds 
through natural increase and an immense immigration, it 
may be a matter of surprise how such an oligarchy succeeded 
in defying it for so long. The reason is not far to seek, and 
has indeed been already hinted at in a former chapter 
touching upon the origin of these peculiar conditions. 
Upper Canada remained almost wholly an agricultural 
country, and for two generations after the war the laborious 
process of clearing its forests continued. Agriculture even 



CONCLUSION 383 

in the cleared regions entailed a hard, absorbing, isolated 
life, and educational facilities had been slow in reaching the 
rural districts. Even the more accessible communities had 
been a long time in acquiring sufficient political vitality to 
make effective attacks on the well-disciplined centres of 
power and privilege. 

Emigration from Great Britain into Upper Canada 
between the war and 1840 was continuous. The Home 
Government took an active part in promoting it, no less 
than fifty thousand souls being landed at Quebec in a single 
year, while the old influx from the States had almost dried 
up. These new-comers, immense benefit as they ultimately 
proved to the country, being almost wholly of the labouring 
class, had neither the time nor the equipment in the first 
generation to concern themselves much with politics. They 
came largely from the surplus agricultural population, with 
which all three Kingdoms at that time, strange as it reads 
now, were equally encumbered. The statistics of these move- 
ments, too, show an English element as large even in pro- 
portion as that from Scotland and Ireland, nor is there any 
sign that it proved, as now, somewhat inferior in the colon- 
ising qualities to the others. The reason for this, too, seems 
tolerably obvious. The Englishman, like the others, then 
came mainly from the rural districts, added to which his 
greater propensity to quarrel with strange conditions of 
life did not then much matter, as he had to stay in the bush 
whether he liked it or not till he outgrew this particular 
form of nostalgia and his robuster qualities asserted them- 
selves. 

The rebellion of Mackenzie in 1837, which incidentally 
put an end to the rule of the Family Compact (so called), 
was a feeble effort in itself, but expressed the rising tide of 
popular feeling. It was concurrent with that of Papineau 
in the Lower Province, equally futile but expressive of a 
somewhat similar protest against a condition of things only 
differing in detail from the situation in Upper Canada, but 
complicated by racial bitterness and other matters which 



384 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

cannot be as briefly tabulated. Neither movement was 
directed against British rule, though it included a few 
individuals who were, but against the withholding what the 
malcontents considered as the promised privileges of British 
representative and responsible government. Their demand 
to-day would be considered only natural and just. They had 
been given the shadow but not the substance of the British 
Constitution, which last, as a matter of fact, had been 
promised, to Upper Canada at any rate, at the division of 
the provinces in 1791. That neither were then ripe for it 
for somewhat different reasons will be the opinion of most 
students of the period. That its full privileges were with- 
held too long, and grave abuses thereby engendered, would 
seem equally certain. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, 
though removed from the racial problems and alien dangers 
that give peculiar interest to the story of the Canadas, each 
witnessed a more or less prolonged struggle between privi- 
lege and democracy, the former represented by a some- 
what similar element to that which dominated Upper 
Canada. This element in all the provinces were, for the 
most part, members of the Anglican Church and supporters 
of its pretensions to exclusive official recognition and other 
favours. The mass of the Protestant population belonged 
to other denominations, and resented this claim to preced- 
ence on the part of the Church, which, as that of a caste 
against whom they had other grievances, became to some 
extent identified with what was regarded as the latter's 
political and social arrogance. Mere priority would in those 
days have doubtless been taken as a matter of course in a 
British colony even by Presbyterians, but there was more 
than this here, for every seventh parcel of the Crown lands 
throughout Upper Canada had been reserved for the support 
of the Church of England. In course of time, as population 
increased, this endowment began to rankle in the minds of 
the Presbyterians and nonconformist majority, more espe- 
cially so as these scattered tracts remaining mostly un- 
cleared, were a serious obstacle and inconvenience to the 



CONCLUSION 385 

rapidly settling neighbourhoods around them. The question 
of the ' Clergy reserves ' was a burning one in Upper Canada 
through the whole of the period referred to, and helped still 
further to embitter the populace against the oligarchy, who 
stood for the Church. A staunch supporter of Family 
Compact rule, many of whose leading members he had 
personally educated, and a militant fighter for Anglican 
supremacy, was the able and famous Bishop Strachan of 
Toronto, born, strange to say, in a Scottish manse. 

I had intended to limit this book absolutely to the eventful 
half-century it professes to deal with, and to say my last 
word with the peace of 181 5. But effective as this seemed 
in the intention, in its fulfilment my last pages had an 
appearance of incompleteness that seemed to invite criticism. 
Having endeavoured to modify this, I need only remind the 
reader again that the Union of the two provinces in 1841, 
the one five-sixths French, the other wholly British, under 
one Parliament and Executive, even with the privilege of 
responsible government, proved no cure for the political 
ailments of Canada. It is difficult to understand how any 
one could have imagined it would do so. The Union was 
serviceable, however, in hastening that federation into which 
Nova Scotia alone, which was then in no political straits 
and quite self-satisfied, came in with any considerable 
measure of reluctance. 

But if Canada ailed politically, knew discontent and 
friction within her borders, and was the despair at times of 
her friends within and without, the half-century following 
the war and terminating with Federation was, despite a few 
interludes, one of amazing material development. The 
French habitants too, in their own slower way, developed 
their country, though at nothing like the rate they increased 
their numbers. The seigniorial rights were commuted for a 
lump sum in 1857, and the censitaires turned into free- 
holders. But for the British, both of the Upper and Lower 
Province, this was, agriculturally speaking, the golden age, 
in which a great majority of the farming population rose 

2 B 



386 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

from the position of poor emigrants with a log shanty in the 
woods to become themselves, or in the persons of their chil- 
dren, the owners of one to two hundred acre farms, equipped 
with as good homesteads and buildings as in any country 
would be held sufficiently adequate. Canada had bred a 
race of farmers, inoculating her successive waves of immi- 
grants with their qualities, that for sturdy industry have 
never been surpassed ; and speaking broadly, grain, which 
at times touched high prices, was the basis of their success. 
There were no fortunes in it, no big men, as in Australia. 
Circumstances, alluded to early in this book, limited the 
scale. Penniless labouring men, or practically such, grew 
slowly into substantial yeomen. There they stopped, for 
their limitations became then practically those of an English 
freeholder in the same situation. This, broadly speaking, 
is the story of the Ontario that we see to-day. It was vir- 
tually completed in an agricultural sense by the year of 
Federation or soon afterwards, and allowing for difference 
in details, brought to a condition resembling England, or 
Denmark, or Pennsylvania, or any other old country where 
men and animals are well housed, convenient to all the 
requirements of civilisation, and where land has to be 
farmed more or less scientifically and intelligently to compete 
with the produce of distant virgin soils. In Ontario, as the 
old Upper Canada is now called, each region as it was suc- 
cessively cleared grew wheat on rich virgin soils for a cycle 
of years, as the North-West on a greater scale and for 
many more years with impunity does now. That, indeed, 
was the basis of its prosperity, the source of supply that 
enabled most of its earlier settlers to establish themselves 
so firmly ere the time came when they had to adopt other 
methods. 

The old U.E. settlers and their neighbours, whom they 
regarded with such distrust, had of course a start of more 
than a generation of the British influx that set in after the 
war. But their settlements along the lake shores were but 
a small fraction of the Ontario that lies open to the eye of 



CONCLUSION 387 

the stranger to-day, not seriously altered since the decade 
following Federation. For I am taking no account of the 
recent manufacturing development and the rise of small 
towns with fresh railroads and other accessories due to such 
industries. Nor when I speak of the province of Ontario as 
being fully developed agriculturally by the year 1873, let us 
say to be safe, as I can speak of that period from experience, 
do I mean to imply that methods or improvements were 
perfected, but merely that, with trifling exceptions in the 
north-west of the peninsula, it was all approximately 
occupied by farmers and cleared of timber save such as was 
reserved for fencing and firewood. The reader must be 
reminded, however, that the Ontario 1 of serious agriculture, 
of habitation and civilisation, is not the Ontario of the map, 
which covers an immense northern and western wilderness, 
valuable, with exceptions not worth considering, only for 
its timber and minerals. Ontario that stands in an agri- 
cultural sense for that great province, is only a broad belt 
from the Ottawa river along the northern shores of Lake 
Ontario, opening out into that fertile western peninsula so 
frequently dealt with in the preceding chapters. All this 
was fully occupied by the decade following Federation, and 
in this decade, that of the seventies, came the knowledge, 
though but half the truth, that Canada had a vast fertile 
West and consequently an altogether wider and greater 
future than men had been accustomed to anticipate. 
Curiously enough, the dawning of this prospect and the still 
recent political success of Federation, marked an apparent 
lull in the pace at which all the Canadian provinces, Quebec 
partially excepted, had been growing since the war of 181 2. 
The last two decades of the nineteenth century may indeed 
be justly described as a period of disappointment. To fully 
indicate the reasons for this would not be difficult, but much 
too exacting on our space. When a once wild country, 
however, is at last cleared up and occupied, and immigra- 

1 Note. — 'New Ontario ' of recent development, in the far West, toward the 
Manitoba border, is not considered here. 



388 THE MAKING OF CANADA 

tion inevitably ceases, one stimulant, as it were, is with- 
drawn. The high prices too following on a succession of 
great wars, had saved the old Provinces of Canada from 
greatly feeling this till the beginning of the eighties, when 
they found themselves in the situation agriculturally of an 
old country, suffering from Western competition and low 
prices. The great West had : already been opened, to be 
sure, and bound to them by its now famous railroad, but as 
yet it had shown them more of its rough than its smooth 
side. It had carried away, too, a considerable fraction of 
their rural population and helped to depress the price of 
their farms. Nor did the New Eden for a long time seem 
to fulfil its promise. It was not as yet properly understood 
while continuous low prices, aggravated by physical mis- 
chances and coupled with an undeniably low winter tem- 
perature, checked that popularity with the European emi- 
grant which its productive, easily cultivated soil ought to 
have ensured. In short, it acquired a very indifferent repu- 
tation in Europe, and even Canadians of the old provinces 
viewed it as a place of settlement with mixed feelings. 
There were even men of sense who gravely affirmed that 
Manitoba would not prove permanently fitted for human 
habitation. The voices of its numerous friends within and 
without who stuck to it, and scouted all such pessimism, 
were not so audible. It grew, of course, quickly enough to 
surprise unsophisticated British globe-trotters, but Canadians 
knew, and Americans knew, that such was not the kind of 
progress a western country of that quality ought to make. 
The comparison with its prototypes south of the line was 
inevitable and discouraging. The old provinces too in the 
same period, though their big towns increased as well as 
their trade and manufactures, were far from satisfied with 
the outlook, if we except the French, whose temperament is 
more independent of material progress and statistics. They 
had reason for this, and comparison with their neighbours 
was significant. They had no longer any lands to offer 
the European emigrant that, with the virgin West both 



CONCLUSION 389 

British and American as an alternative, besides the attrac- 
tions of the other colonies, would have been worth his 
acceptance. That was, of course, inevitable ; but the flower 
of their own youth had been for long leaving them by 
thousands for the States, and the census returns of Ontario, 
the most prosperous region of all, had dropped to that of 
a normal European country. Solid comfort abounded, 
but individual wealth was rare, which seemed, with the 
example of the United States confronting them, vexatiously 
anomalous to the materially patriotic Canadian, almost 
indeed a reproach. The country, sound as it was, had an 
outside reputation of being relatively poor and certainly of 
being slow-going. The Canadians themselves echoed the 
cry, while their young men showed their views, as I have 
said, by a steady emigration to the States. The British 
capitalist thought lightly of the Dominion, not of its credit, 
which was above reproach, but of its scope as a profitable 
financial field. And this was all the harder as Canada 
seemed to possess every essential for rapid progress, including 
a vigorous people — equally capable as farmers, traders, or 
manufacturers. There was something the matter, but 
nobody quite knew what. It was in the very last years of 
the century that Canada ' found herself,' and commenced that 
new era of development which only to those who knew it 
before and after, fully reveals the breach which divides the 
Dominion of the nineteenth century from that of the 
twentieth. 

The causes of this astonishing forward movement would 
provide material for a chapter. In brief, however, the 
Americans, who for nearly a century had looked on Canada 
commercially with good-natured contempt, discovered the 
North- West, a discovery stimulated by the virtual filling up, 
as the word there means, of their own West. They have 
come in since by the hundred thousand, ready-made Western 
farmers, with capital and experience. Concurrently, and 
no doubt half-consciously encouraged by the movement of 
such undoubted experts, and by a vigorous government 

2B2 



39Q THE MAKING OF CANADA 

immigration policy, an immense volume of emigration from 
Great Britain and elsewhere has steadily flowed into the 
same vast and fertile prairies. Above all, the movement 
has been wholly successful. The difficulties that troubled 
the earlier emigrants have proved to be, in the main, those 
of conditions now passed away, both natural ones incidental 
to a raw virgin country, and commercial ones inevitable to 
scattered remote communities. Though the world-price of 
grain is not greatly higher than in the depressing old times 
in the Canadian West, facilities for transport and the recog- 
nition of its peculiar value has raised the Canadian article 
to a price that spells prosperity, and that, humanly speaking, 
can hardly fail to be at least maintained in the future, while 
millions of virgin acres have yet to be broken, not only to 
grow grain but to feed stock. The old provinces, with their 
splendid water-power, more especially that of Upper 
Canada, in whose primitive woods, amid the far different 
scenes of other days, we have spent so much time in these 
pages, are the suppliers of these great and growing regions 
with practically every manufactured article they require. 
Here too and for this purpose American energy and capital 
of another sort has flowed in to share in the prosperity and 
incidentally strengthened the position of the Canadian 
manufacturer, who now, like the Canadian agriculturist, 
sends his wares to every quarter of the world. 

The farmers of the old British provinces, and even parts 
of Quebec, have by degrees, and with much intelligence, 
adapted themselves to new conditions and Western com- 
petition. In the seventies and eighties they farmed very 
much on the lines of the lesser tenants in Essex or Suffolk 
or similar tillage districts in England, and only suffered 
less because they were in the main their own labourers. It 
is to their credit that they had begun very generally to 
readjust their methods before the present era set in. With 
dairying, and pedigree-stock, co-operation in most branches 
— not difficult with a uniform level of freeholders — poultry, 
fruit, and other small products, they are able to take full 



CONCLUSION 391 

advantage of their greatly improved local markets and the 
greater facilities for export. We have wandered something 
from the conventional path of history in this closing chapter, 
and this brief glance at a few of those the leading causes, 
which have contributed to the making of current history 
such as it is in Canada to-day. The atmosphere of Canada 
is not conducive, perhaps, to retrospection, of the kind at least 
to which this book invites. But not every new country — 
grafted as this is upon an older one — throws its roots back 
over so long, so chequered, and so picturesque a past, of 
which the half-century here dealt with is beyond doubt the 
most continuously stimulating portion. 



INDEX 



Abraham, Plains of, 95. 

Adams, S., 134, 210. 

Adet, 223, 228, 242, 263. 

Albany, 307. 

Allen, Ethan, 70, 72, 79, 86, 125-6, 

243, 320. 

Ira, 125, 243. 

Amherst, General, 3, 23, 161, 251. 

Amherstburg, 304, 320. 

Amiens, Peace of, 286. 

Anderson, Captain, 99. 

Armstrong, 290, 342. 

Arnold, B., 70, 77, 82, 84, 90, 93, 95, 

104, 105, 257. 
Astor, J. J.,307, 337-8. 

Baby, M., 56, 180. 
Badeau, 277. 
BaicSt. Paul, 49. 
Bailly, 161. 
Baltimore, 294. 
Barclay, 336-8. 
Barnesfare, 94. 
Barre, 62. 
Beaujeu, de, 257. 
Beauport, 216. 

de, 259. 

Beaver Dam, 333, 335. 
Bedard, 276. 
Berkeley, 288. 
Black Rock, 318. 
Blanchet, 276. 
Boerstler, 335. 
Boisbriant, 165. 
Boston, 73, 130. 
Boune, de, 276. 
Bouquet, 113. 
Bourgoyne, 106-10. 
Boyd, 332, 349, 350. 
Braddock, 6. 

Brant, 1 21, 152, 229, 256. 
Brantford, 152. 
Briand, 158. 

Brock, 285, 299, 301-14. 
Brockville, 327. 



Brown, 79, 80, 90, 95-6, 348-9, 350, 

356, 358, 360-6. 
Brownstown, 320. 

Buffalo, 309, 315, 318, 340, 349, 350. 
Burd, 120. 
Burford, 367. 
Burke, 9, 175-76. 

Burlington Heights, 333, 341, 360-1. 
Burr, Aaron, 93. 
Burton, 3, 32. 
Bushy Run, 20. 
Butler, 120. 



Caldwell, 8y, 97, 180, 250. 
Calhoun, 289. 
Calvet, 156. 
Camerons, the, 269. 
Campbell, 205. 
Cape Breton, 142. 
Carleton, Sir Guy, 39, 45-8, 50, 
127-31, 136-9, 158-77, 183-4, 



Si, 

[89, 

[90, 200-1, 205, 208, 215, 218, 223- 

7- 

Lady M., 65, 106, 159, 227. 

Carolina, South, 127. 

North, 149. 

Carrignan regiment, 15. 

Carrol, 99. 

Castlereagh, 272, 275. 

Chalus, de, 259. 

Chambly, Fort, 75, 103. 

Champlain, Lake, 77, 103, 108, 150, 

164, 285, 295, 299, 323, 346, 350, 

356, 369. 
Chandler, 332-3. 
Charleston, 128, 131, 202, 203. 
Chase, 99. 

Chateauguay, 344-50. 
Chatham, 270, 339. 

Lord, 62. 

Chaudiere, river, 84, 116. 

Chauncey, 324, 329, 330, 332, 334, 

336, 348, 358, 361, 367- 
Chesapeake , 288, 374. 
Chippewa, 318, 356, 359, 360, 364. 



INDEX 



393 



Chittenden, 219, 243. 

Christie, 249, 280, 282. 

Chrystler's farm, 349, 350. 

Clarke, G. R., 1 17, 218. 

Clay, 14, 289, 291, 292, 297, 322 

Clegg, 312. 

Clinton, 128, 136. 

Colbert, 12. 

Contrecceur, 76. 

Cornwall, 350. 

Cornwallis, 126, 257. 

Craig, 274-82, 290. 

Cramahe, 57, 58, 65, 76, 85, S6, 87, 

158. 
Crown Point, 70. 

Daley, Captain, 346. 

Dartmouth, Lord, 70, 72. 

Dearborn, General, 96, 305, 307-8, 

323, 327, 329, 330-5. 
Delawares, the, 207. 
Denant, Bishop, 254. 
Dennis, Captain, 313, 340. 
De Peyster, 196. 
D'Estaing, 114. 
Detroit, 11, 13, 21, 116, 150, 219, 256, 

295, 299, 3QI-4, 306-7, 319, 367. 
— — River, 320, 338. 
Diamond, Cape, 89, 93. 
Dickson, 272, 310, 350. 
Disney, Captain, 44, 45. 
Dorchester, Lord. See Carleton. 
Dowie, 369, 370. 
Drummond, Sir G., 302, 355, 357, 

362-8. 

Major, 344. 

Duchesney, 251, 346. 
Dundas, 225. 
Dunn, 254, 283. 
Durham, 46. 

Earle, 324. 
Edgehill, 20. 
Egremont, Lord, 39. 
Elliot, 309. 
Elmslie, 257, 258. 
Erskine, 289. 

Eustis, Dr., 295, 301, 326. 
Evans, 311, 314. 

Fanning, 146. 

Fayette, La, 152. 

Ferguson, 344. 

Finlay, 76, 180, 183. 

Fitzgibbon, 335. 

Forster, 104, 105. 

Forsyth, 327, 328, 348. 

Fort Erie, 309, 314, 318, 364, 367. 



Fort Garry, 270. 

George, 311, 312, 314, 331, 332, 

334, 341, 342, 35 8 > 360, 361. 

Maiden, 338. 

Meigs, 321, 322. 

William, 221. 

Fouchet, 251. 
Four Corners, 344. 

Mile Creek, 308. 

Fox, C. J., 62, 175. 
Franklin, B., 70, 99, 132. 
Fraser, John, 49, 76, 180. 

Malcolm, 93. 

Frenchtown, 320, 321. 
Frobisher, 250. 
Frontenac, 150. 

Gage, 70, 73, 77. 

Gaines, 366. 

Gait, 260. 

Gaspe, de, 166, 279, 283. 

Gaspe, 249. 

Genet, 202, 204. 

George in., 22, 155, 212, 297. 

Georgian Bay, 236. 

Germaine, Lord, 103, 105, 107-9, I2 8. 

Gladwin, 19. 

Glengarry, 149, 260, 269^361. 

Gore, Sir Francis, 264,^73, 285. 

Grand River, 152, 270. 

Grant, Judge, no. 

Commodore, 185, 264. 

Grants, the, 269. 
Graves, Admiral, 77. 

Haldimand, Governor, 3, in- 15, 
123, 125, 126, 147, 148, 152, 155-7. 

Halifax, 10, 142-45, 103, 239, 244, 
284. 

Hamilton, Governor, 117, 158. 

Alex., no, 203, 208. 

Hammond, 200. 

Hampton, Wade, 341, 344, 346-51. 

Handcock, 356. 

Harrison, General, 282, 319, 321, 

336-9. 
Harvey, 332, 349. 
Hatt, 312. 
Hays, the, 269. 
Henderson, 88. 
Hendricks, 83. 
Henry, Patrick, 140. 

290. 

Hey, 42, 44, 51, 59, 76, 85. 

Hillsborough, Lord, 54. 

Holcroft, 313. 

Hope, Governor, 158. 

Howe, General, 77, 108, 130, 136. 



394 



THE MAKING OF CANADA 



Hubert, Bishop, 158, 161, 182. 
Hudson, 108. 

Hull, General, 295, 301-6. 
Hunter, Governor, 259, 262-4. 

Illinois, the, 117. 

Irving, 39. 

Izard, 345, 367, 369. 

Jackson, J. M., 273. 

General, 376. 

Jay, 132, 207, 210, 237, 287. 

Jefferson, 202, 288, 289. 

Jenkin, 328. 

Jessup, 149. 

Johnson, Sir W., 20, 58, 75, 118. 

Sir John, 118, 149, 184. 

Guy, 118. 

Kennebec, the, 82. 

Kent, Duke of, 157, 182, 244, 325. 

Kentucky, 263, 268, 319. 

Kingston, 147, 184, 189, 190, 196, 

237, 256, 266, 324, 327, 341, 

368. 



La Colle, 356. 

La Corne, 31, 41, 76. 

Lanaudiere, no, 166, 

279. 
La Prairie, 81. 
La Tourtre, 82. 
Laurens, 132. 
Laws, Captain, 96. 
Le Brun, 62. 
Leopard, the, 288. 
Levis, 3. 

Lewis, 320, 334, 348, 349. 
Lewiston, 308, 314. 
Lincoln, General, 229. 
Liverpool, Lord, 297. 
Livingston, 80. 
Livius, Judge, no. 
Long Island, 136. 

Point, 231, 337. 

Sault, 349. 

Longueil, 15, 180. 
Lorette, 58. 
Lotbiniere, 251. 
Louis xiv., n. 
Louisbourg, 10. 
Louisiana, 288. 
Lundy's Lane, 356, 361-5. 
Lunenburg, 144. 
Lymburner, 167, 172-75* 
Lyttelton, Lord, 63. 

Mabane, 24, 76, 180. 



[80, 249, 



MacArthur, 304, 367, 375. 
M'Clure, 341, 342. 
Macdonald, Flora, 149. 
Macdonalds, the, 269. 
M'Donnell, Bishop, 260. 

Colonel, 310, 312, 313, 316, 327, 

328, 345-8. 

M'Donnells, the, 149. 

M'Donogh, 370. 

M'Intosh, Fort, 207. 

M'Lean, 87, 88, 96, 97. 

Macombe, 348, 369, 371. 

Macovog, 43. 

Macpherson, 269. 

Madison, 290-3, 305, 338, 374. 

Malbaie, 48. 

Marryott, 59. 

Maryland, 294. 

Maseres, 44, 51, 59. 

Mayanga, 304. 

Merritt, 360. 

Meyer, 332. 

Miamee Indians, 205. 

River, 208, 210, 237, 303, 320, 

33 6 - 

Michigan, 219, 306. 

Michillimackinac, 25, 219, 367. 

Miller, 304, 334, 362. 

Milnes, Governor, 249-53. 

Minas Bay, 143. 

Miquelon, 32. 

Mississippi, 263. 

Mohawk River, 120, 203. 

Mohawks, the, 151. 

Molson, 283. 

Monk, 160, 204, 216, 353, 354- 

Monroe, 288. 

Montgomery, 78, 79, 90-7. 

Montmorency Falls, 157, 182. 

Montreal, 1, 2, 25, 29, 32, 34, 41, 42, 
43, 72, 73, 75. 76, 77, 81, 103, 104, 
140, 141, 149, 160, 175, 178, 206, 
227, 249, 280, 283, 295, 323, 341, 
343, 344, 347, 34^, 35°, 368, 369, 
371, 373- 

Moravian-town, 339, 340. 

Morgan, D., 83, 93, 96, 97. 

Maurice, 55, 137. 

Morrison, 349, 350, 364. 

Morse, 145. 

Mountain, Bishop, 179, 182, 238, 250, 

251, 254. 
Muir, 304. 
Murray, 3, 17, 18, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 

29, .30-4, 42, 49' 
Muskingum, 229. 

Nairne, 49, 96. 



INDEX 



395 



Napoleon, 286-8, 292, 295, 297, 298. 

Newark, 256, 265, 342. 

New Brunswick, 145, 146, 158, 172, 

193. 

Hampshire, 125. 

Orleans, 263, 376. 

York, 125, 127-30, 136, 137, 139, 

161, 172, 308. 
Niagara, II, 1 16, 120, 121, 195-8, 

219, 240, 256, 299, 341, 361. 

Fort, 308, 310, 331, 332, 342. 

River, 311, 358, 362, 364. 

Nootka incident, 176. 

North, Lord, 63, 70. 

Nor'- Westers, the, 221. 

Nova Scotia, 130, 142, 146, 158, 172, 

182, 183, 192, 248. 

Ogdensburg, 317, 327, 328. 
Ohio, 117, 121, 205, 218, 263, 319. 
Orleans, Island of, 15, 48, 90, 99, 

216. 
Osgoode, 184, 199. 
Oswegatchie, 104. 
Oswego, 158, 219, 357. 
Ottawa River, 104, 221, 232. 

Paine, Tom, 134. 

Panet, 251, 277. 

Papineau, 353. 

Parr, Governor, 138. 

Payne, 42. 

Pearson, 327, 350, 362. 

Pennsylvania, 149. 

Penobscot, 375. 

Perceval, 279, 297. 

Perry, 337. 

Philips, 104. 

Pike, 330. 

Pinkney, 288. 

Pitt, 174. 

Plattsburg, 346, 356, 368-71. 

Plessis, Bishop, 251, 254. 

Pointe-aux-Tremble, 85. 

Pontiac, 21. 

Porter, 359-62. 

Portland, 225, 246, 251, 252, 257. 

Port Dover, 367. 

Talbot, 367. 

Powell, 180, 199, 316. 

Prescott, 75, 242, 244, 245, 246, 249, 

327- 
Pres de Ville, 94, 97. 
Preston, 72, 81. 
Prevost, Governor, 284, 307, 319, 324, 

327, 328, 329, 340, 342, 343, 347, 

355, 357, 368, 370-3. 
Prince Edward Island, 146, 158. 



Procter, 303, 306, 320, 321, 322, 336, 

338, 339, 340, 344. 
Puisaye, de, 257-9. 
Purdy, 346. 

Quebec, i, 22, 25, 28, 31, 34, 41, 43, 
54, 57, 77, 89-124, 158, 161, 175, 
178, 181, 183, 216, 226, 227, 242, 
249, 253, 254, 259, 271, 273, 274, 
279, 280, 283, 285, 286, 305. 

Queenston, 350, 361, 362. 

Heights, battle of, 311- 16. 

Quinte, Bay of, 147, 154. 

Randolph, 205. 

Reynolds, 320. 

Riall, 350-61, 364. 

Richardson, 321. 

Richelieu, 2, 72, 150, 356, 369. 

Riedsel, Baron, 104. 

Madame, 121. 

Ripley, 360, 362. 

Rivington, 136. 

Robinson, B., 146, 309, 312, 364. 

Rochefoucault - Liancourt, Duke of, 

229, 230. 
Rogers, James, 149. 

Robert, 150. 

Rolette, 304. 
Ross, 374. 
Rottenburgh, 336. 
Russell, 255-9. 
Ryerse, 231. 
Ryland, 250. 

Sackett's Harbour, 307, 324, 327, 

33i, 343, 344, 356, 357. 
St. Anne's, 104. 
St. Charles River, 90-5. 
St. Clair, Lake, 236, 338. 
St. Davids, 341 375. 
St. Foy, 1. 

St. Francis River, 116. 
St. George, 259, 303. 
St. John, Fort, 55, 72, 75, 79, 80, 108, 

282, 323. 
St. Lawrence River, 2, 11, 12, 15,148, 

49, 75, 80, 116, 123, 126, 154, 190, 

227, 237, 243, 298, 327, 344, 348, 

35o. 
St. Leger, 109, 126. 
St. Ours, de, 251. 
St. Pierre, 32. 
St. Roche, 91-5. 
Salaberry, de, 323, 344-8. 
Sandusky, 338. 

Sandwich, 256, 301, 303, 305, 336. 
Sault St. Marie, 219, 367. 



396 



THE MAKING OF CANADA 



Savannah, 128, 131. 

Schuyler, 77> 79- 

Scott, Hercules, 359, 363, 365. 

Judge, 325- 

Winfield, 161, 315, 325, 329, 330, 

33L 359> 362. 
Secord, Laura, 335. 

Major, 359. 

Selkirk, Lord, 260, 276. 
Senneville, de, 104. 
Sewell, 251, 253-5. 
Sheaffe, 309, 314, 315. 
Shelburne, 145. 

Lord, 39, 140, 157. 

Shelby, 339. 

Sherbroke, Sir J., 375. 

Sidney, Lord, 159, 172. 

Simcoe, Governor, 183, 195-8, 200, 

201, 218, 219, 225, 229, 230, 231- 

41. 

Lake, 236. 

Mrs., 230. 

Port, 231. 

Smith, Judge, 159, 160, 172, 180. 
Smythe, 308, 309, 310, 316-19. 
Stone, 360. 
Stopford, 75, 80, 81. 
Strachan, 325. 
Street, 358, 359. 
Stuart, 354. 
Sullivan, 121. 
Suite, 57. 

Talbot, 260, 269, 270. 

Taschereau, 25, 276. 

Tecumseh, 203, 204, 205, 320, 339, 

340. 
Templer, 72. 

Thames River, 201, 240, 338, 339. 
Thompson, General, 101. 

J., 86. 

Three Rivers, 3, 32, 47, 102, 103, 276. 

Thunder Bay, 222. 

Ticonderoga, Fort, 55, 70, 72, 76, 108, 

109. 
Tippecanoe, battle of, 282. 
Tonnancour, de, 75, no. 



Toronto, 201, 237, 263. 
Townsend, 128. 
Tryon, 76. 
Turgot, 12. 

Van Alstine, 156, 196. 

Vancouver, 176. 

Van Rensselaer, 295, 308-16. 

Vaudreuil, 104. 

Vermont, 125, 126, 156, 219, 243, 368. 

Vincennes, 117. 

Vincent, 331, 333, 334, 341. 

Wabash, the, 121. 

Wadsworth, 315. 

Walker, 42, 43, 44, 67. 

Washington, General, 77, 115, 125, 

127, 129, 135, 152, 202, 203, 207, 

208, 212. 
Waterloo County, 260. 
Watteville regiment, 348, 365. 
Wayne, 200, 208, 229, 237. 
Weeks, 272. 
Western, Fort, 82. 
White, 262. 

Wilcocks, 272, 341, 355. 
Wilkinson, 335, 341, 344-50* 355- 
William, Prince, 166. 
Williams, 313. 
Williamsburg, 349. 
Winchester, General, 319-21. 
Windham, 257-9. 
Windier, 332, 333. 
Wolfe, General, I. 
Wolfe's Cove, 94. 
Wool, 313, 369. 
Wooster, 101. 
Wyandottes, the, 207. 
Wyatt, the, 272. 
Wyoming, 120. 

Yeo, 327, 334, 336, 343, 356, 357, 

358, 367, 369. 
York, Little, 236, 256, 266, 325, 329, 

330, 358. 
Yorktown, 126. 



Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty 
at the Edinburgh University Press 



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